It doesn’t stop here though – there is one more, very important area that lab users can influence to reduce the climate footprint and environmental impact of their lab work: the products used in the lab.
My name is Nikoline Borgermann, I work as an independent green lab consultant, and here’s what you can do to influence the products entering your lab – even if you are not in charge of ordering.
Laboratory products don’t just fall from the sky
Each product that enters the lab leaves behind a considerable environmental footprint: the raw materials were extracted from Mother Earth using energy, and possibly chemicals too; the raw materials were transported to a production site, where the facility consumed energy, water and chemicals to convert the raw materials into a lab product; the final product was then wrapped and packaged in plastic, cardboard, or polystyrene (maybe even with a set of ice packs or dry ice); and the final product was transported to your lab – possibly across an ocean followed by a long haul overland. Finally, after being used, parts of the product will end up as waste which is then transported somewhere for its end of life, which is potentially many thousands of kilometres away from your lab. Thus, one of the keys to going green in the lab, is to focus on the products entering the lab.
Influencing procurement when you are not the one ordering or choosing products
Maybe you don’t order anything yourself because there are dedicated people in the lab or the institute for that role. Or perhaps your institute or university has common procurement agreements with certain suppliers that limit the ordering options but give you better prices (and thus more research for the money). Even if you don’t have much choice when ordering, or you are not the one adding products to a virtual cart online, you can still influence procurement. In fact, you have a lot more power than you might realise!
How is this?
Products are purchased because products are being consumed. So by consuming less, you can change what is ordered and what enters the lab. And minimalism really is the key word here. How low can you go when diluting an antibody for a microscopy stain or a western blot? Could you save the antibody dilution and use it for another western blot? How little reagent can you use in your experiment? Could you use a smaller tube – or maybe even reuse the tube? Could you go down a size with a cell flask to minimise plastic and medium consumption?
If you start using as little material and reagent as possible, you can make a huge green difference, and save a lot of money for the lab at the same time!
What defines a greener product?
While the best thing you can do is reduce the products entering the lab in the first place by consuming less, purchasing greener products for the lab will also have a great impact.
So what defines a green lab product? Green(er) lab products come in many guises as there are many ways to reduce environmental impact. In general, greener products are optimised for reduced resource use and waste production in terms of their production, packaging, transportation, use, and/or disposal. And preferably, all of those!
The easy ones: packaging and transportation
For many lab users, the most obvious waste of resources is the packaging: tiny vials in giant boxes, massive amounts of plastic material in and outside of boxes, polystyrene boxes with enough dry ice to cool down ten times the amount of products ordered.
These examples are encountered in all labs.
Packaging is without doubt extremely important to secure the quality of the products and it would be a waste of resources if products broke on their way from supplier to lab. But there is a limit to how much packaging we need to protect the products!
So, one way for manufacturers and vendors to reduce the environmental impact of their products, is to optimise their packaging – by reducing it and/or substituting it for less harmful materials. As an example, plastic cushioning inside of boxes can be substituted for hay or other light and dry bi-products of farming. Manufacturers can take back cold storage boxes for direct reuse. Boxes can be minimised to fit their contents, which not only reduces the amount of cardboard, polystyrene, plastic cushioning, icepacks and dry ice, it also reduces the carbon emissions from transportation of the packages. The larger the box, and the heavier the box, the higher environmental impact of the transportation.
Another way for manufacturers – and you – to influence transportation, is to consolidate deliveries. If you combine your orders, you reduce the number of deliveries and thus reduce the carbon emissions from transportation.
The more difficult, but often more impactful one: the product itself
While packaging and transportation are for sure contributing to the environmental impact of a lab product, we sometimes forget that the product itself did not just fall from the sky either.
In fact, for the majority of products (inside and outside of labs), most of the environmental impact comes from the contents, not the wrapping and the transportation.
Each phase of a product life cycle can (and should!) be optimised in terms of sustainability.
Ideally, the raw materials have been sourced responsibly and sustainably – in terms of both people and the planet; the production facility runs on renewable energy; and the product is manufactured with as little energy, water, chemicals and materials as possible. Also, the product contains as little (or no!) plastic as possible, is composed of recycled materials, and is reusable or recyclable. It contains no harmful materials and reagents, and leads to as little waste as possible.
I am sure you know of those kits where you always run out of the same (very expensive) reagent first, and you end up with heaps of various, inexpensive buffers. You might keep them ‘as extras’ when opening a new kit because it feels wrong to dispose of them, but realistically – what are you going to use them for when you don’t have the expensive, limiting factor reagent to combine them with anyway?
You are probably also familiar with the manufacturers’ protocols guiding you to use much more reagent than you really need. In my previous lab we had manufacturers’ protocols telling us to use four times the volume of cloning reagents than was actually needed. We also had protocols stating that we should cover each microscopy coverslip in 500 mL of their expensive staining solution when 50 mL would in fact be enough!
These are examples of wasteful kits, and you can make a green difference by choosing kits
with less waste and by deviating from the manufacturers’ protocols. Remember that their top priority isn’t necessarily to help you minimise consumption and waste production!
Substituting harmful reagents for greener and safer alternatives
In the process of answering all kinds of important scientific questions, we’re using a lot of nasty chemicals in the lab. For example, ethidium bromide, which is commonly used for staining DNA, is mutagenic. Dichloromethane – a solvent typically used for peptide synthesis – influences the central nervous system and can cause dizziness and drowsiness (and is suspected of causing cancer). And methanol cannot only cause blindness or death when ingested, it’s also absorbed through the skin and inhalation and can cause irreversible effects.
Many of the reagents that are harmful to you are also harmful to the environment because their toxic effects target many kinds of species. This is why there’s a huge overlap in what’s good for you and what’s good for the planet when it comes to the chemicals and reagents used in the labs!
Luckily, the concept of green chemistry can help you find greener and safer chemical alternatives for your work. In short, a green chemistry product is better for people and the environment, plus it’s the same price or cheaper than existing alternatives, and functionally it is equivalent or outperforms existing alternatives. And the impact of its production and disposal on people and the planet is also taken into account!
There’s a handful of online tools which can help you identify green chemistry alternatives. For instance, I can recommend having a look at Beyond Benign and My Green Lab to find out more!
Making green choices today and influencing the products of tomorrow
As outlined above, you can have an impact on the products being purchased for your lab by consuming differently and by picking (or advocating for) greener products and green chemistry. Importantly, you can also influence the products of tomorrow by letting manufacturers and vendors know that you are interested in greener products.
So every time you are in contact with manufacturers and vendors, ask them about sustainability. Are any of their products optimised in terms of resource consumption or waste production? Are they using green energy in their facilities? And what do they do to reduce the environmental impact of their transportation activities?
Manufacturers will only develop greener products and reduce the environmental impact of their operations if they know that their (potential) customers care about sustainability – so remember to let them know that you do!
