With technically minded staff, a controlled environment, and above-average environmental impact, labs are perfect candidates for sustainability initiatives.
Worldwide, labs produce endless benefits to healthcare, life sciences, agriculture, advanced manufacturing (e.g. semiconductors), … the list goes on and on. However, the benefits these labs provide come at a great ecological cost: normal R&D and production operations in labs also cause immense waste.
Sustainability initiatives are often big picture, long term, complex, expensive, and hard to measure. Organizations of all sizes and types—not just labs—find them challenging. Additionally, when it comes to the benefits of sustainability program implementation, any return on investment (ROI) of time, money, and effort is difficult to demonstrate.
This often means that this immense sustainability opportunity is not taken full advantage of, and lab workers are unsure as to how to get started toward environmental goals. The best way to start is to break down some of the larger concepts and reach for some low-hanging fruit—or contact Triumvirate Environmental to get started.
Labs: Perfect Candidates for Sustainability Initiatives
Compared to a typical home or office space, a lab is a major environmental impactor. These spaces are generally more intensive in terms of:
- Water: Autoclaves, glass washers, and other water-intensive equipment are essential for many labs—meaning an overall water scarcity exacerbated by frequent over-consumption. Not only that, but lab water waste often requires treatment for safe and compliant disposal.
- Energy: Given their specialized and energy-intensive operations, labs usually consume 3 to 10 percent more electricity per square foot than office spaces do. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning is a heavy contributor to this, since lab spaces often have intensive temperature and air changes per hour (ACH) requirements.
- Emissions: Lab buildings represent 4.4% of total annual global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
- Waste: The chemicals and materials labs use are a vast contributor to overall waste production. Waste forms include:
- Hazardous chemical waste. These materials poses a threat to human health and is subject to strict regulations for collection, storage, and disposal. This makes it more expensive and less efficient to dispose of than other forms of waste.
- Biological waste. Usually collected in red biohazard bags, these potentially infectious or toxic materials are also subject to strict collection and disposal regulations.
- Single-use plasticware. Syringes, petri dishes, containers, and more are typically necessary for use in sterile experiments, but often result in high quantities of waste sent to landfills.
- Packaging materials. Be it single-use plastic, cardboard, or other materials entirely, packaging materials are necessary to keep glassware intact, maintain specific temperatures, and avoid contamination. This results in a significant waste stream in most labs.
These heightened impacts mean that there is a significant opportunity for green lab programs to succeed and provide meaningful results.
On top of this, the advanced nature of lab work requires that all lab teams need to be technically skilled, innovation-minded, and dedicated to maximizing efficiency and results.
This talent means that sustainability solutions, once implemented, will be that much more effective and thorough.
The combined presence of a highly dedicated team and an exceptionally wasteful environment is the perfect storm for sustainability program success.
Benefits of Environmental Program Implementation
Successful green lab programs can mean both quantitative and qualitative ROI, and can lead to a number of positive outcomes, such as the following:
- Streamlined waste management: Full awareness of all lab waste streams can result in greater program control—and enable conscientious disposal decisions.
- Informed compliance: Larger waste volumes may be subject to specific local and federal regulations—ones that demand waste minimization efforts and subsequent data tracking. Data gathering can help ease compliance when it comes time to prove waste diversion efforts.
- Improved collaboration and innovation: In a successful sustainability program, lab teams need to work together to determine new creative ways to eliminate, reuse, or reduce generated waste. To do so effectively, they must share ideas, offer feedback, and constantly communicate what’s working—as well as what isn’t. The more vision that can be brought to waste disposal efficiencies, the better. Process changes can be implemented throughout operations, from procurement, to process design, to waste disposal. The more creative an organization can be, the greater the opportunities for success.
- Cost savings: Green lab programs save money over time. Reducing waste generation, energy usage, and water usage will have immediate effects on overhead costs. For programs with principal expenses, grants and financial assistance are often available from federal or state programs.
- Carbon footprint reduction: Green lab programs will have direct impacts on your organization’s scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions. This may involve diverting waste from landfills and incinerators, reducing utility usage, or reducing transportation impacts throughout the organization. Reducing carbon footprint can help your organization achieve their internal and regulatory goals.
- Corporate empowerment: Success in green lab programs can drive corporate-wide benefits as well. Using the same principles on a different scale, sustainability can be made a reality throughout an entire organization—maximizing benefits. Tying Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals to corporate Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can give an organization a competitive edge in the industry and become a driver for positive change. Even a small-scale green lab program can have major impacts on the success of these goals.
- Brand improvement: As a lab team, you have the opportunity to be a leader in change. We can all do well by doing good. People genuinely care about sustainability—so those in your immediate community and beyond will be grateful you are doing your part to protect our shared planet. Implementing sustainability into your lab spaces and corporate considerations can do wonders for your brand and public image—your customers and employees will appreciate it and you’ll feel better about your role as a green mission-driven leader. This will help with brand loyalty as well as employee retention and satisfaction as well.
Green Lab Programs: Actionable Impact
As discussed above, there are at least seven reasons to adopt green lab programs. This list is not exhaustive, however—the benefits of environmental program implementation will be expansive and long-lasting. But this won’t happen on its own; there are some actionable steps that should be taken to improve upon the sustainability of any waste obstacles:
Energy Consumption: Researchers have a direct influence on roughly 35% of all lab energy via:
- Lighting
- Plug load
- Plug load makes up about 22% of the energy used in a lab. Reducing this by 10% would be the equivalent of removing about 550,000 cars from the road.
- Equipment power draw
- Fume hoods use about 3.5 times the energy of a typical home.
- Cold storage, including ultra-low temperature freezers (ULTs) or -80 degree freezers, can consume as much energy as a single household. With multiple similar appliances operating simultaneously, this compounds quickly.
- Other specialized systems
So how do we address energy consumption?
- Turn off lights when exiting any room or workspace. Train employees to do this every time they leave a room. Lights should be off unless it’s absolutely necessary they remain on.
- Implement a sticker system. Use different colored stickers to indicate which pieces of equipment can be unplugged/turned off regularly, and which need to remain on. This could look like:
- Green: Turn this machine on when you need to use it and off when you’re done.
- Yellow: Keep on during the day, but not overnights or weekends. Hot water baths are a good example of “yellow” equipment. Outlet timers can help ensure equipment is ready when researchers return in the morning, even if the machine is turned off overnight.
- Red: Do not turn this machine off. Often, this is equipment where a lack of power affects calibration or incubation.
- Shut the sash on a fume hood to save about two homes’ worth of energy.
- Within fume hoods, remove excess equipment or supplies, as these may obstruct airflow and reduce machine efficiency.
- Warm up freezers. Increasing temperature from -80 degrees Celsius to -70 degrees Celsius can save reduce energy consumption by 30%, depending on the freezer model. Of course, this should only be done when sample integrity can be maintained at the higher temperature.
- Preventative maintenance can save about another 10% of energy. This includes doing such things as:
- Maintaining door seals
- Defrosting
- Removing ice build-up
- Cleaning filters
- Vacuuming coils
- Put autoclaves in standby mode.
- Share equipment among labs.
- Turn off (and unplug) duplicate appliances.
- Encourage others to change behavior in their labs or when sharing equipment.
Water Consumption: Lab researchers use a lot of water, via the use of:
- Single-pass cooling systems
- Autoclaves
- Reverse osmosis (RO) systems
Reducing consumption can involve:
- Deploying low flow aerators to reduce water at the tap by 50-70% while maintaining water pressure.
- Finding alternatives for single-pass cooling—for example, using recirculated water or condensers to improve heat exchange and take heat out of the water.
- Ensure autoclaves, dishwashers, and similar equipment are as full as possible before running them.
- Use water of only the appropriate quality for every experiment; don’t use deionized (DI) or RO water unless necessary. It can take up to three gallons of tap water just to make one gallon of DI water.
General Waste Generation: Everything that is brought into the lab will eventually need to be disposed of, from plastic weigh boats to refrigerators. Labs generate 5.5 million metric tons of waste each and every year. Consider single-use plastics, for example: the average person disposes of about 150 kg of plastic waste annually. By contrast, the average scientist disposes of about 1,000 kg—seven times more plastic waste than the average person. A 10% reduction of the average scientist’s plastic waste would offset the emissions from 250,000 cars.
This can be managed by:
- Intelligently reducing waste, where possible. Closely study what you are discarding and analyze the processes involved in the procurement and use of each waste stream. Then, ask you why need to use particular amounts of any given item. Where you find gaps, you can determine areas of improvement and adjust measurements to improve both upstream procurement and downstream waste generation.
- Refuse materials that add to existing waste volumes. Look for alternative products that accomplish the same thing as your existing ones do—but without generating the same volumes of waste. For example: do you need sterilized materials, or can you sterilize onsite? Also, ensure procurement is efficient and only bulk order what you will actually use. Consult with other labs within your facility to find ways to consolidate orders wherever possible.
- Reuse equipment and tools. Think about extending their lifecycle, where possible. Some commonly used lab items that are options for sterilization and reuse:
- Conical tubes
- Centrifuge tubes
- Cell culture plates
- Review waste streams to determine if it’s possible to switch from single-use plastic to more reuse-friendly glass or aluminum items.
- Creatively reuse gear. Repurpose old equipment to support applications in a new way.
- Recycle lab plastics in an existing lab waste recycling system. Talk to your vendors to see if they have recycling programs in place for lab plastics. More and more producers are considering extended producer responsibility (EPR), meaning products are being designed with recyclability in mind. This means that your procurement and disposal partners should be ready to help you figure out the most sustainable option and pivot from a cradle-to-grave to a cradle-to-cradle approach.
- Maintain a dedicated procurement department for smart purchasing instead of just leaving buying up to one or two lab personnel. This will centralize the process and:
- Ensure up-to-date chemical and consumable inventory. Such an inventory will prevent over-ordering and thus, the buildup of excess material that will expire in storage.
- Improve materials evaluation, so teams can check to see if:
- Each item entering the lab is sustainably made
- There are ways to make materials procurement more sustainable
- There is a way to plan for any given material’s disposal before it is even used
- Consolidate purchases to cut down on the number of orders made and deliveries shipped to the lab.
- Seek a waste management partner to support your efforts. Some questions to ask to determine the best partner for you:
- What services does the waste management partner provide? Just waste disposal, or other innovative recycling solutions for various waste types as well?
- What types of waste can be recycled/reduced with their methods?
- What are the limitations of each method? These limitation discussions enable open communication about potential issues, and also help managers pivot waste disposal plans to leverage sustainability initiatives
- How are their teams trained?
- What skills do they bring to the table that you don’t currently have on staff?
- Anticipate equipment upkeep. Try to predict future preventative maintenance events for large-scale machinery. Unplanned downtime eats up valuable resources; regular monitoring of resource usage and contamination status will ensure a machine is always up to its full working potential. This is true for machinery such as:
- Fume hoods
- Biosafety cabinets (BSCs)
- Tissue cabinets
- Donate—don’t dispose. Maximize ROI on outdated or excess, but still operational, lab equipment by giving it to worthy organizations.
- Recycle equipment that shows substandard performance. Some vendors offer trade and buy-back opportunities, depending on the asset.
Partner for The Most Impact
As discussed, waste management vendors are key—for both the front-end management and planning of waste streams, as well as the back-end disposal. One of the greatest challenges will be to consider the individual actions of every single person on the team—and how each can impact the sustainability program.
Partners can also help achieve many of the steps outlined above, such as:
- Equipment decontamination
- Training and personnel behavior changes
- Implementation of effective communication strategies within labs, facilities, and vendors
- Third-party accreditation and certification
- Regulatory compliance
- EHS consulting
- Professional support and program implementation/management
- Auditing and program evaluation
- Sustainable program gap assessments
- Creation of environmental action plans
A growing number of organizations suggest 2030 as a goal completion date (potentially changing based on regulatory update). With so many different factors and lab sustainability approaches available, it can be difficult to pick a single course. A dedicated and effective partner on your side can help guide you to the solution that’s best for you; together, you can overcome any and all lab sustainability challenges.
Contact Triumvirate Environmental today to learn why we are just such a partner.
