Making Sustainability Fun
Get Hyped Up
- Have a launch event for your Green Lab Program. Explain to everyone what you are trying to do, your goals and how they can get involved. Have a 2-way conversation where others can input ideas.
- Have a variety of commitment levels. Not everyone can commit the same amount of time. Have different tiers of involvement.
- Recruit an ambassador from every lab. This allows feedback from all labs as well as someone to help promote and dissementate information
- Food
Education and Reminders
- Perform specific training to ensure staff know they can be turned off
** Get installation Engineers to demonstrate
**Very specific presentations for your own lab with lots of pictures and best practice guidance for instruments, freezers, reagents, etc - Make it part of the onboarding and part of equipment specific training
- Bring it up at lab meetings and scrum/huddle meetings
- Circle back and ask staff how they are funding the change
- Assign the task to someone
- Lead by example
Targets and Tracking
- Set goals for each lab
- Track each lab’s results. Continuous tracking allows feedback to labs so they can make changes and be able to track the effects of those actions and see their progress.
Have Challenges and Games
- Publish everyone’s results. This allows people to see the impact of their actions and have a goal to work towards. A little healthy competition can really help everyone get into the spirit.
Celebrate Successes
Those who reach their sustainability goals or win might get a prize or a special party to celebrate.
Have Lab/Freezer Clean-out Day
- Have everyone dedicate a 3 hour block to cleaning up the lab. Together, everyone goes through old chemicals, the freezers, etc.
Advertising
Potty posters
- captive audience
Other Arguments
Fumehoods - lab safer and also more sustainable
Shut the sash
- if something catastrophic happens, the rest of the lab is protected
- prevents scientist solvent exposure
Improve air flow - declutter (not storing things) - more space, less unsafe chemicals left there
- raise equipment
Freezers
Good inventory means:
- easily find samples (saves time)
- don’t duplicate work
- no unlabeled samples (safety)
- no double buying of reagents (save money, safer having fewer chemicals around)
- reduce time to find samples and reduce injuries while in freezer
Increasing temperature:
- better for the compressor, less frequent failures
Biosafety cabinents
- Annual certification and maintenance (safety)
- declutter (safety)
- reduced cross contamination and lab acquired infections
Share equipment
More benchtop space
Digitalize
Less clutter in the office - not a ton of paper storage around
Better to control data expiry to better ensure confidentiality
Purchasing/Centralized ordering inventory
Combining orders means less shipping costs
Centralized inventory means buying less reagents, less chance of running out of storage space, less lab clutter
First-in-first out policy - reduce solvent waste and reduce wasting materials
Turn off Equipment
- Saves money
- Extends equipment lifetime
- Reduces waste heat - lower temperatures in the lab, decreases air conditioning need
Green Chemistry
- safer for scientists
- reduce the required air change rates (energy savings)
- easier disposal (cheaper)
Contamination
A popular argument against glass or any other reusable material is that toxin carryover or cross contamination can occur, however, plastic is still a relatively new material introduced to Labs. In earlier times when plastic wasn’t in a lab, scientists used glassware to conduct experiments which didn’t result in defective results.
Align incentives
Often organizations are large and different departments handle different things and are assessed on different things. This leads to misalignment of incentives. Often times, lab scientists are the ones who need to put in the effort for sustainable practices, like shutting off equipment or shut the sash after use, but the savings benefits building management. Your manager or PI doesn’t actually see the savings directly. Of course, what’s good for the environment is good for everyone, and what’s good for your organization, is good for everyone, but if your sustainable idea requires monetary investment, it can be challenging to get the budget passed.
Help building services calculate how much money you are saving for them and ask them to contribute back to your sustainability initiatives. Some universities take the saved money and offer labs a “sustainability fund” to reinvest into new initiatives.
In turn, building services should give labs plenty of incentives to buy the most energy efficient equipment instead of what’s cheapest.
How to change a system
18_points_diagram_v3 (1) 1.pdf (71.5 KB)
Objections
There’s no money to do it
There are guaranteedd savings and performance contractors that pay for lab projects and you pay out of your energy savings. If you don’t save as much as expected, then they will write pay you monthly until it does.
Contacts:
Beth Mankameyer - beth.mankameyer@jci.com
Bill Herrera - bherrera@tel-americas.com
How Money is Saved
While the most popular objection is that there is no money to begin a green lab, it is quite the opposite. By simply just switching the type of equipment bought you can save thousands of dollars/euros. The Marine Institute in Galway, Ireland saved 15,800 euros/16,000 dollars by starting their Green Lab path. The institute saw the biggest savings in money by simply reducing the operating time of fume hoods and switching to compostable containers as it is much cheaper than plastic containers.
The LEAF pilot program demonstrated that labs who are green save (on average) $4,490.
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