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A sustainability blog for biologists whose goal is to reduce laboratory waste, use green chemistry, and improve efficiency. Green labs thrive!
Chemists exploring barrel after spill at school Image Copyright : Rainer Klotz
U.S. Laboratories with expertise in biology, chemistry or radiation should consider signing up to help first responders in environmental emergencies. Learn more about the ERLN in this post!
Read MoreTake the My Green Lab sustainability quiz today!
Read MoreLearn about how using the power of habits can help to reinforce sustainable behavior in the lab!
Read MoreUtilize the natural competitiveness of Scientists to fully engage them in your Shut the Sash competition! "I've never seen so many closed hoods before" is a win-win for everyone!
Read MoreShutting the sash can result in huge savings for your lab, department, and institution! Quentin explains how this simple program could save his University upwards of $300,000 PER YEAR
Read MoreNot all fume hoods are created equal - but all can be managed better! Save almost 2/3 the operational cost by making sure that your Shut the Sash program is working with these amazing case study tips!
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Quentin recently wrote 5 tips to ensure that your lab's Shut the Sash efforts create awesome results. Here he explains in more depth the what and the how for implementing tip 1!
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Copyright: bakhtiarzein
The pilot program is officially off and running! Five laboratories at the University of Chicago are participating, including the Adams, Dolan, Horne-Badovinac, Gounari, and Turkewitz labs. I met with each EcoLeader individually to discuss how I can best help their labs reduce their carbon footprint. There was some variation, although most of the approaches are the same. Additionally, I realized just how important working with facilities would be to not only help these pilot labs, but make any large impact division-wide.
All of the pilot laboratories are within the biological sciences, so there is some degree of similarity between the labs, although their level of initial sustainability was extremely variable. One lab studies flies and much of their materials are reused and processed for them, so waste creation was not a big issue for that lab. Another creates a lot of plastic wrap waste, but collects the wrapping to recycle at the grocery store. Some labs use fume and cell culture hoods all the time, while others do not. One lab was already so good about waste creation and energy reduction that I had to give them extra challenges. Most of the labs were pretty small, but one lab is fairly large with quite a few very passionate individuals to remind other more forgetful lab members to shut the fume hood. A few labs use a lot of tin foil, so we talked about how they can reduce, reuse, and recycle non-contaminated tin foil. I also spoke with each lab about chilling up their ultralow freezers from to -70. They were all fairly receptive to the idea, and a few have already begun chilling up their freezers! Water use was an issue in a few of the laboratories, which was the first sign that facilities services needs to be working with us to make a real impact.
When discussing increased recycling with the laboratories, I discovered that facilities are inadvertently undermining the labs’ previous attempts to be more sustainable. Labs in every building have seen facilities services dump the recycling into the trash, rendering any recycling attempts completely futile until facilities fixes their protocols. I would love to start expanding our efforts, but first our communication with facilities must improve. This was a common theme across many approaches to increase sustainability. The facilities staff turns on the lights overnight and do not turn them off when they are finished. And to top it off, leaking faucets in some buildings are rarely fixed, so a tremendous amount of water is wasted.
GreenLabs has set up a meeting with facilities, including building managers and someone in charge of electricity use. We are hoping to tackle waste disposal, water waste reduction, and electricity use reduction in this meeting. Regarding waste, we would love for facilities to recycle what is in the recycling bins and only replace plastic bags when the bins are full or it is necessary to do so. I hope to work with facilities to install water aerators and improve their response time to leaky faucets. Lastly, there are many simple behavioral cues that can be placed throughout biology buildings that could greatly reduce electricity use in labs, including signage to turn off the lights, use less paper towels, and shut the fume hoods. It would be wonderful if facilities could help GreenLabs distribute these signs to make huge impacts division-wide!
Biologists often collaborate with non-scientists to improve environmental footprints. Events and spaces that remind us of our place in nature are a great way to connect everyone in a school or workplace to sustainability goals. Megan Williams, was a Research and Core Team Technician in the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences at Kings College London, when she saw an empty outdoor space on her urban campus and envisioned a community garden for fellow biologists, students, staff, and campus workers.
You might be skeptical looking at plastic recycling in the lab and you probably should be. The expectation is that carefully sorted non-contaminated recycling collections will be remanufactured into products that will lower the demand for fossil fuel-based plastic. Unfortunately, according to the report, The Real Truth About the U.S. Plastics Recycling Rate, the conversion of plastic recycling collections into new materials, known as source reduction, has failed. Mixed plastic collections are especially at risk.
Good science can go further with lab changes that drive down costs. The problem is that biologists asked to cut overhead costs in biotech or pharma lab work may not know where to begin. A nice overview of universal approaches to improving lab sustainability was shared with Labconscious by Steve Miller from Lab ReNew.
Solutions for changing climates are in demand for agriculture, carbon dioxide removal, methane abatement, health impacts, and many more areas. There is funding available. What’s holding biotech back? Talented scientists often don’t know where to find funding and how to communicate their projects to investors in a compelling way.
Drosophila is strongly associated with scientific discovery, but this model organism also represents practical advantages for sustainability from research to industry. When you look at the field you can’t help being impressed by the resources conserved by the approach.
Biologists should be aware of two trends related to this update from My Green Lab. First, lab sustainability accreditations have emerged as requirements in research grant funding policies, and second, government regulators have raised the bar across the board for green claims and certifications to overcome a loss in public trust.
It’s always exciting when a maverick hits the mark. The first polylactic acid (PLA) Petri dish product is a one-to-one replacement for labs using fossil fuel-based plastic plates for cell culture. The maker, a small privately owned company called Diversified Biotech, Inc., collaborated with researchers from Brandeis University to develop it. Fostering eco-justice with a simple swap sounds good, but could this specialized PLA material even improve cell culture?
If ultraviolet light decontamination is not supported for class II biosafety cabinets in BSL-2 labs, and UV bulbs consume so much energy, why are most new BSC cabinets still ordered with UV lamps? Spoiler alert: some burgeoning bioscience applications require it, and fortunately, there are some options to improve its sustainability.
Often, the validation work involved in establishing new protocols holds us back from improving the sustainability of lab work. Patrick Penndorf, a cofounder of the Re-Advance initiative, explains their efforts to overcome barriers to sustainable science and gives scientists a chance to join their Innovator Team.
Labconscious is an open resource for biologists to support sustainability and green laboratory work to reduce the environmental footprint of bench science.
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Over the past year, Célia Algros took part in a project to discover microbial enzymes that could metabolize nucleosides in an internship at NEB. In an offshoot of this project, she also surveyed energy consumption, consumables, and waste generated to estimate the carbon cost of her E. coli transformations. The effort gave her a new appreciation for both the complexity of calculating carbon footprints and the sizable environmental impact of experiments.