Happy New Year to everyone! Green Your Lab has many new and exciting plans to forward our mission to support the sustainable labs movement around the world. Thank you to all of our volunteers, partners and, of course, this community (a.k.a YOU!).
2022 was a fantastic year full of growth and change. As we embark on an exciting start to the new year, we want to take a moment to reflect on the lessons we’ve learned and to share some of our favorite highlights.
1. Sustainability is a teamwork effort
This year Green Your Lab joined forces with incredible people, organizations, and universities. We are so thankful to have been invited to educate and share our work at the Trinity College Dublin’s Green Week Panel, University of Exeter, UBC Human Health Venture and Climate Venture Studio, University of Strasbourg’s Environment Day, Cambridge BioMakespace, and the Green Lab Work Conference.
We also partnered with I2SL (International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories), LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework), and Green Laboratory Work to publish a piece in the FEBS (Federation of European Biochemical Societies).
2. Incredible work is happening on the sustainability front-lines.
After a long hiatus to direct resources to building our new community platform, we’ve brought back our ever-popular Green Talk Series! We had amazing speakers who educated us on a variety of topics from an anything-goes open Q&A session with Dr. John Warner, successes/challenges of starting a Green Lab at the Max Planck Institute (Dr. Martine Ballinger) to sustainability in our economy (Prof. Samson Alayande). You can watch the replays on our new YouTube Channel!
3. It’s a wide community of green scientists and you are never alone.
We were honored to be invited to help lead a workshop at the Marie Skałodowska-Curie Actions conference. It would have been an incredible opportunity to forward the Green Labs movement, but we just could not justify the carbon footprint of flying cross-ocean. At first we doubted ourselves, but we were overwhelmed by your positive responses and support. We’re glad that we took a stand and we are happy to see that we’ve inspired others to choose to forego carbon intensive conference travel.
We saw strong growth in our community-sourced Green Lab Best Practices database. Thank you for sharing your best tips and tricks.
And of course a shout-out to everyone who has been generously helping answer questions on our forum. Together we are stronger.
This year we grew a lot, we are so thankful for every opportunity, and for this encouraging community. We take everything we learned in 2022, to make 2023 the greenest year yet. Watch this space to see what we have planned for you!
With the best wishes,
Green Your Lab