Thomas
Freese
a,
Nils
Elzinga
b,
Matthias
Heinemann
c,
Michael M.
Lerch
*a and
Ben L.
Feringa
*a
aStratingh Institute for Chemistry, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: m.m.lerch@rug.nl; b.l.feringa@rug.nl
bGreen Office, University of Groningen, Broerstraat 5, 9712 CP Groningen, The Netherlands
cGroningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands
First published on 18th March 2024
Scientists are of key importance to the society to advocate awareness of the climate crisis and its underlying scientific evidence and provide solutions for a sustainable future. As much as scientific research has led to great achievements and benefits, traditional laboratory practices come with unintended environmental consequences. Scientists, while providing solutions to climate problems and educating the young innovators of the future, are also part of the problem: excessive energy consumption, (hazardous) waste generation, and resource depletion. Through their own research operations, science, research and laboratories have a significant carbon footprint and contribute to the climate crisis. Climate change requires a rapid response across all sectors of society, modeled by inspiring leaders. A broader scientific community that takes concrete actions would serve as an important step in convincing the general public of similar actions. Over the past years, grassroots movements across the sciences have recognized the overlooked impact of the scientific enterprise, and so-called Green Lab initiatives emerged seeking to address the environmental footprint of research. Driven by the voluntary efforts of researchers and staff, they educate peers, develop sustainability guidelines, write scientific publications and maintain accreditation frameworks. With this perspective we want to advocate for and spark leadership to promote a systemic change in laboratory practices and approach to research. Comprehensive evidence for the environmental impact of laboratories and their root-causes is presented, expanded with data from a current case study of the University of Groningen showcasing annual savings of 398763 € as well as 477.1 tons of CO2e. This is followed by guidelines for sustainable lab practices and hands-on advice on how to achieve a systemic change at research institutions and industry. How can we expect industry, politics, and society to change, if we as scientists are not changing either? Scientists should lead by example and practice the change they want to see.
Sustainability spotlightResearchers across the planet play a key role in enhancing the energy-, feedstock- and material-transition necessary to allow for circularity and thus mitigation of the climate crisis. Their contribution, education and skills are necessary to develop the sustainable future by meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Scientific research is also vital for climate awareness and solutions, however, it paradoxically contributes to environmental issues through traditional laboratory practices. Operating laboratories and conducting experiments leads to excessive energy consumption, (hazardous) waste generation, and resource depletion. With this perspective we want to provide and spark quality education among scientists on how to improve as a community on research and laboratory operations (SDG No. 4). We provide institutional evidence and advice on a systemic change in academia, industry and (procurement) infrastructure to allow for responsible consumption (SDGs No. 9, 12). |
Although scientific research has achieved remarkable successes and advantages, conventional laboratory methods carry unintended drawbacks. Scientists paradoxically contribute to environmental challenges despite their attempts to address them through research. Laboratory practices are marked by excessive energy consumption, waste generation, and resource depletion (Fig. 1).7 Laboratories have the highest mean heating and electricity consumption of an institution, being responsible for 60–65% of the whole university's total energy consumption.1 Laboratory research produces an estimated 5.5 million tonnes of (single-use) plastic waste annually, corresponding to 2% of the global plastic waste.15 Resources such as water required in laboratories for cooling and washing correspond to 60% of the total water consumption of a university.1 All together the annual work-related footprint of a researcher correlates to 10 to 37 tons of CO2 equivalents (CO2e), which is much higher than the Paris aligned annual carbon budget of 1.5 tons CO2e to maintain the climate.1,7,16
Fig. 1 The overlooked environmental impact of laboratories and scientific research. Data without citation were generated through this research article. |
It is in our very nature as scientists that we want to understand life, molecules, materials, physical principles, and its laws of nature – however by our actions we are not only harming ourselves but also the planet surrounding us.17–19 While we investigate environmental problems and recommend sustainable practices and solutions across several sectors, there clearly exists friction between our scientific practices and their potential contribution to mitigate climate change and meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).20,21 Current laboratory practices are outdated22 and need thorough transformation alongside all other sectors of society.3 Over the past years, scientists – increasingly aware of these environmental concerns – have been demanding sustainable laboratory practices as a response and recognizing the importance of starting with changing their own operations.5,8,23
These sustainable laboratory practices are so far independent of the underlying research questions conducted in the laboratory and are often referred to as Green Labs.1 Green lab efforts focus on improving resource and energy efficiency, waste reduction, and environmental responsibility. In this way, Green Labs serve as the scientists' answers to the dissonance within their own sector and as an acknowledgement of academia's role in serving as a role model to educate and prepare future generations, researchers, innovators, and decision makers for the challenges ahead.
Fact-based analyses on the environmental impact of research and laboratory practices form the core of Green Lab movements and promise a reduction in the overall environmental footprint of a given institution towards a net-zero climate goal, all of which further contribute to cost reductions, without comprising or limiting the research or results obtained in a laboratory. Hence, scientists play a crucial role in not only providing solutions to climate change but also to renew and update their own workplace and laboratory practices. The education of students about sustainable laboratory practices will ultimately lead to a bottom-up paradigm shift in many organizations across society. Ultimately, a scientific community that is taking concrete actions serves as an important step in convincing the general public of similar actions.16
In this article we provide a comprehensive literature review on the environmental impact of laboratories, collecting most recent evidence for the systemic change necessary. We further explore the benefits, challenges, and implications of transitioning to green labs, with a concrete case study and supporting data of the University of Groningen, NL. The last section provides guidelines for sustainable lab practices and hands-on advice on how to achieve the desired systemic change. These guidelines synthesize relevant literature, a sequential plan on concrete green lab measures, accreditation programs, and success factors in transitioning to sustainable laboratories. Disciplines such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, computational science, life sciences, neuroscience, pharmacy, and physics will be covered. Given that the absence of resources is frequently highlighted as a significant knowledge gap, we envision this article as a comprehensive tool in understanding the relevance of sustainable laboratory practices and on how to improve as a scientific community. This article aids the scientific community in convincing peers and supervisors on the environmental and financial opportunities by improving their research practices and science.
Scientific experiments are often resource intensive and wasteful, both in wet and dry lab (computational) facilities. Many experiments require temperature control, increased ventilation, vacuum, protective atmospheres, or high sterility. Next to operating equipment in a laboratory building, the manufacturing and disposal of (single-use) laboratory consumables can be resource- as well as energy-intensive. Also, computational laboratories are energy-intensive through running code, processing algorithms, and data generation in high-performance computing (HPC) facilities. To reach net-zero targets, research needs to be conducted in a way that protects the environment, reducing CO2 emissions, and preserve natural resources by allowing for regeneration and limiting waste.2 The following section will highlight the evidence and analyses on the environmental footprint of laboratories.
Direct and indirect carbon emissions are reported according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol with the following three categories:24
Scope 1: direct emissions from refrigerants, on-site electricity generation, heating, and vehicles.
Scope 2: indirect emissions from electricity or energy purchased for heating or cooling of buildings, which is generated off-site.
Scope 3: indirect emissions across an organisation's whole value chain, such as products purchased from suppliers and sold to customers. This also includes travel, production of laboratory equipment, chemicals, materials, and waste disposal.
These numbers are correlated with the equipment being operated in these research spaces. Fume hoods and ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers are among the most energy intensive:28
- One single fume hood consumes 3.5 times more energy than an average household.27,29,30
- One ULT freezer consumes 2.7 times more energy than an average household (20–25 kW h per day).16,31,32
In the US, approximately 500000 to 1500000 fume hoods are being operated, with operating costs exceeding $6 billion per year.29 Harvard University estimates that 44% of the energy used in a lab is directly related to ventilation, with an average annual cost of operation of 4107 € per fume hood, and 3103 € per ULT freezer.26,33 Based on further reports, the other 10–50% of energy is used by (plug-in) equipment such as freezers, autoclaves or centrifuges, where up to 15% can be consumed by lighting.18,28 Standard freezers at temperatures of −20 °C or biosafety cabinets consume as much energy as 0.5 households.18 Some laboratories operate facilities such as X-ray light sources, synchrotrons and high-performance computing clusters, increasing the energy consumption drastically. Here power demands can range from MW scale, corresponding to tens of GW h of electricity annually, to hundreds of MWs in the case of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which accounts for approximately 2% of Swiss electricity consumption.1,34,35
Running algorithms, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and maintaining hardware all correlate with energy usage and ultimately with an environmental footprint.23,37,38 Tasks such as training an artificial intelligence model corresponds to 5 times the lifetime emissions of an average American car.39
Around 100–150 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions are generated annually by the digital sector, and the yearly electricity usage of data centres is over 205 TW h.38,40 This consumption surpasses the energy usage of entire countries, including Ireland and Denmark.41,42 The impact from electricity consumption only for supercomputing generates an average of 4.6 tons of CO2e per researcher working in astronomy per year.43 In particular, astronomers, who operate telescopes and observatories as well as high-performance computing centres, have a drastic annual carbon footprint of up to 37 tons CO2e emissions per researcher (60% from supercomputer usage, 17% from flying, 13% from operation of observatories, and 10% from powering office buildings.44,45
The estimated computing requirements of Australian astronomers is 400 million CPU core-hours (MCPUh) annually, with an anticipated increase to 500 MCPUh per year by 2025.45 The Institute of Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) in France estimated that running observatories and generating observatory data correspond to 4100 tonnes of CO2 per year, the equivalent of 2050 petrol cars running all year.17
Other resources such as helium are utilized for cooling in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and in MRI imaging. It is further used as a carrier gas in gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis.1 Liquid nitrogen is also used excessively as a cooling agent, and its usage can be optimized as well.
Uncoordinated on-demand shipments of chemicals and equipment result in parallel shipments from the same manufacturer or supplier to an organization resulting in avoidable cardboard boxes and packaging material waste.
Furthermore, animal facilities can have a considerable impact on the energy consumption of an organization and thus should be reduced in size and optimized.
Scientific discoveries often rely on collaborations, human interactions, and discussions. Attending conferences, workshops and seminars is thus a crucial aspect of being a researcher or academic. However, emissions related to in-person conference attendance accounts for half of an academic's flight emissions.45,69 There are 8.4 million researchers on the planet, where if assumed that each of them travels to just one conference per year, the travel footprint of scientific conferencing surpassed the total CO2 emissions of entire countries such as Uganda.70 Conference attendance accounts for 35% of a researcher's footprint (e.g., 4 years of PhD study).71
The magnitude of the travel-related carbon footprint of the scientific community can be illustrated by analysing conferences such as the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN), which attracts about 30000 attendees to the United States from across the globe.72 Comparing the city of origin of attendees to the meeting in Washington, DC in 2014, an estimated round-trip distance per person of 7500 km was obtained. Resulting in 22000 metric tons of CO2e generated only through this conference, the emissions surpass the annual carbon footprint of about 1000 medium-sized laboratories.16
Other disciplines such as astronomy regularly estimate the footprint of conferences and institutes.73–76 The 2019 annual European Astronomical Society meeting in Lyon (European Week of Astronomy and Space Science) resulted in 1.9 tons CO2e per participant (1240), which are comparable to the annual per capita emissions of countries such as India.73 Attending the International Biogeography Society (IBS) meeting accounts for an average round-trip air travel distance of 9564 km and 3.0 tons of CO2e per researcher (a total of 857 tons of CO2e per conference).77
Another research study revealed that presenting a conference paper results in at least 800 kg of CO2e and increases for presentations located in popular but non-central locations such as Hawaii (1290 kg per paper).78,79
For the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union 28000 participants travelled 285 million kilometres towards and back, corresponding to twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Through attendance 80000 tons of CO2e were emitted, which is about 3 tons CO2e per scientist equal to the weekly emissions of the city of Edinburgh, UK.80 Estimations from 2008 indicate that science travel emissions in that year accounted for 0.23% of all international aviation emissions, corresponding to 4.3 tons CO2 per capita.78
Flight frequency and emissions scale with scientist seniority, with an average senior staff member emitting 9.5–12 equivalent tonnes of CO2, a postdoc emitting 4 tons CO2e and a PhD candidate 2 tons CO2e per year.45,81 Most notably however, there is no relationship between scholarly success and air travel emissions based on metrics of academic productivity (h-index adjusted for academic age, discipline and seniority).80,82 When it comes to disciplines and flight-related emissions, astronomers emit 8.5 tons CO2e per researcher annually.44
The current modes of work, cooperation, mobility, and internationalisation are key aspects of the academic life, but conference models need to be optimized to mitigate future emissions.3
The energy challenge that laboratory building designers are confronted with is the large volume of air ventilation needed to meet safety requirements (see above). Whereas office buildings require a ventilation standard of one air change per hour (ACH) or less, laboratory buildings require exchange rates of 6 to 10 ACH, corresponding to every 6 to 10 minutes.4,27 Laboratory buildings also require unusually high and stable plug loads, i.e., the energy required to operate centrifuges, ovens, computers, or spectrometers in comparison to other institutional or commercial buildings.4
One lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spent about 30000 $ on electricity and released 163 tonnes of CO2 per year.18 The average emissions per research laboratory are approximately 479 tons of CO2e.90 Greenhouse gas emissions from universities range from 1 to more than 37 tons CO2e emissions per employee.3 Differences in numbers can be attributed to incomplete inclusion of different sources of emissions in calculations. There is a wide gap between the numbers reported and thorough tracking of Scope 1–3 emissions such as transport, supply chain and building activities. Greenhouse gas emissions of molecular biology or chemistry research for example fall into four categories: real estate and infrastructure; travel and commuting; production, transport and disposal of equipment and chemicals; energy usage by heating, ventilation, and air conditioning of laboratory buildings.7,27
Several individual disciplines or research institutes aim for complete footprints: astronomy reports about 18–37 tons CO2e annually per researcher, chemistry approximately 5.6–9.6 tons of CO2e, and life sciences about 4–15 tons of CO2e, each of those on top of personal emissions (i.e., private life).3,7,25,43,44 The main sources are air travel, electricity use and computing (up to 22 tons CO2e).3 In 2021 the average greenhouse gas emissions per capita in Europe were 7.7 tons of CO2e per year, indicating that scientists' research activities emit 2–5 times as much as an average person.91
Many funding organisations are yet to start reporting greenhouse gas emissions. Estimates indicate that an international panel of referees and group of applicants emit per interview more than 1 ton of CO2e.
Generally, where climate reports exist, they are often not comprehensive across all scopes of emissions and thus are underestimating its complete environmental footprint.85,92 For the ones aiming to be complete, the share of Scope 3 emissions of the total carbon footprint is 5–10× greater than the amount of the other categories.3,6 This corresponds to 80–90% of an organization's footprint being associated with Scope 3 emissions.6,7,25,56 Often air travel is reported to be the major source of emissions, because it is easily tracked and thus followed, but especially from organizations where all scopes of emissions are reported, other sources such as buildings, electricity, and supply-chain emissions may be equally or more important emission sources.3,93
The previous data drastically highlight the impact scientific research has on the planet, especially given the fact that researchers of all disciplines only account for 0.1% of the population.94 It is clear that while science allows us to understand and address the climate crisis, it also enables and contributes to it.10
Independently, a grassroots group for greener laboratories was formed at the Faculty of Science of Engineering (FSE) within the life sciences department in 2020. Another separate movement on sustainability of laboratories was growing at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in 2021, both of which combined to Green Labs RUG in 2022.
In line with these ambitions, the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) launched the “FSE is going green” program in 2022. Several working groups were formed, consisting of staff and students, whose topics were based on an internal assessment of the most pressing sustainability issues within the faculty and ideas from staff and students. Next to adopting the previously mentioned Green Labs RUG team and incorporating it under the “FSE goes green” umbrella, other working groups include: sustainable canteens, food and events, travel behaviour of staff, greening our grounds and sustainable logistics. Efforts have already resulted in a sustainable canteen pilot, improved building insulation, accreditation of sustainable laboratories and advice about staff air travel reduction, based on a faculty-wide survey.
The grassroots movements focusing on sustainable laboratory practices (Green Labs RUG) achieved full top-down faculty support through the “FSE is going green” program, which also allowed for funding. These efforts are further in line with the sustainability roadmap, and thus supported and coordinated together with the Green Office. With the following sections we want to provide and highlight data that we gathered through improving and evaluating current laboratory practices. By expanding the literature precedent, we further provide more proof for the relevance of sustainable laboratory practices, its benefits and elaborate on certain actions.
Since 2018, the CO2 emissions connected to electricity consumption (Scope 2) dropped significantly: parts of the electricity are geothermically self-produced (16000 000 kW h annually) and 2% of the total energy use are self-produced through solar energy (1385250 kW h). Green energy certificates started in 2018 (53126 001–57811 385 kW h annually), which are certified as wind- and solar energy from The Netherlands. Thus Scope 2 (currently produced and delivered through Vattenfall©) decreases through electricity certificates by vertiCer© from 2018 onwards. These, however, should only be treated as a ‘transition period’ and not as a final solution to the emissions caused by energy and electricity. As of time of writing the authors are not aware of any further improvements or concrete plans related to the carbon impact of energy usage at UG, but recommend transitioning to a green energy provider.
The UG aims to provide complete calculations for Scope 3 emissions: while food data and correlated emissions were reported until 2019 a change in the host of the canteens resulted in inaccurately reported data since 2020, thus the average of the years 2018/2019 was used to estimate the food emissions for the following years. The Green Office is currently investigating these issues to track food data in the future.
2021 and 2022 had a significant lower air travel as well as commuting footprint due to the COVID-19 crisis. Commuting values stayed low in 2022 due to implementation of home office opportunities and upgrading the public transport in Groningen to full electric. Air travel of 2022 increased back to pre-pandemic times.
Scope 3 emissions cover all other categories, which in comparison to the previously mentioned categories are not contributing too much to the overall footprint of the UG. The emissions of waste are relatively low when compared to electricity, gas, food, commuting or air travel. While the footprint of waste should not be underestimated, these values put the future sections covering laboratory waste (chemicals and plastics) in perspective as still drastic numbers of hazardous and plastic waste are produced annually. The waste category in Fig. 2A includes all residual, plastic, organic, paper, coffee cup waste, as well as electronic, glass, and hazardous waste. Under ‘purchased goods’ the water consumption (e.g., 154425 m3 (2019); 93573 m3 (2020), 130769 m3 (2022)) is included.
It is crucial to mention that although the carbon footprint calculations of the university are almost complete, not all emissions of Scope 3 are included yet. Buildings, their construction, and reconstruction, are not included in the Scope 3 emissions of the university. However, as of 2024 there might be an opportunity as a new chemistry, physics, and engineering building (Feringa Building) will be finished, which will contain a great number of disciplines and laboratories of the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Here the material used for its construction should be included in future calculations of the UG, which could potentially be used as basis to extrapolate to the other buildings.
As for FSE, the move from one location to the other requires an inventory of precision instruments, laboratory, and office equipment, and of the furniture per lab and office, allowing for an extrapolation on furniture and laboratory equipment to the whole university. Thus, an inventory was made of office chairs, desks, drawer units, cabinets, meeting chairs and tables at the location Nijenborgh 4 (NB4). After conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) including all relevant data (production, materials, resources, packaging materials and transportation) for all goods the CO2e of furniture at the NB4 location corresponded to 1032 tons (2.7.9 ESI†). We further calculated the annual CO2e emissions through correlating the emissions to average years of depreciation of ten years, resulting in 103 tons CO2e annually. Afterwards the m2 of office and meeting room space of each building at FSE was used to calculate the furniture footprint per building as well as the total, which corresponded to an annual CO2e footprint of 304 tons for FSE (Table S48 ESI†). These additional data will be applied in calculating more complete carbon emissions of 2023 onwards and were added in retrospective to the emissions from 2015 to 2022.
Currently, data storage and data centres are not included in the Scope 3 emissions. The UG operates its own data centres which are not included in the calculations. The university is further outsourcing much data at Google©, which is running on 100% renewable energy since 2016 equalling to zero emissions.96
Most of the carbon emissions of a university are connected to its educational- and research-practices in natural sciences (between 52 and 70%,43,56 see Section 2 Environmental Impact of Laboratories). At UG these are located at the Faculty of Science and Engineering covering all research related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) with disciplines such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, chemical engineering, computational science, life sciences, maths, materials science, pharmacy, physics, and more.
In Table 1 the total CO2 emissions of the UG in the years from 2017 to 2022 are put in perspective. For 2019 most of the carbon footprint of the university is Scope 3 emissions (72.2%, when electricity offsetting is included), which is mostly generated through research practices in STEM.97 In fact, the carbon impact of FSE corresponds to 43–53% of the total CO2e emissions of the whole university. The annual number of publications in the field of STEM are tracked through the Nature Index, which corresponds to 390 publications by FSE in 2019.98 Thus at FSE per publication 68 tons of CO2 are emitted, equalling to annual emissions of about 9 tons per person (2889) and 0.19 tons per m2. The carbon emissions of the authors of this article are depicted in Table 1 in further detail since the start of their academic career. While CO2 emissions scale with seniority as publications per year increase, all authors drastically exceed the annual carbon emissions per capita in Ethiopia, the annual emissions per car, and the Paris aligned annual carbon budget to limit temperature increase to 1.5 °C. The Paris aligned annual carbon budget is exceeded by T. Freese by a factor of 14×, by N. Elzinga by a factor of 2×, by M. Heinemann by 25×, by M. M. Lerch by 16× and by B. L. Feringa by 216×.
Emissions at the University of Groningen and Faculty of Science and Engineering in perspective | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2017 | 2019 | 2022 | ||||
w/o offset | w/o offset | w/o offset | w/o offset | w/o offset | w/o offset | |
a Source: Nature Index (https://www.nature.com/nature-index/). b Calculation per staff of FSE (2889) as support staff is needed to maintain laboratories. Area: 140782 m2. c The calculation was conducted through the emissions per publication of 2019 and correlation with the average number of coauthors, which were calculated from the 20–40 most cited, and 20–50 most recent articles of each author. d Source: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/and IPCC report. | ||||||
Total CO2e emissions (UG) | 64389 tons | 49213 tons | 61829 tons | 32275 tons | 48362 tons | 20417 tons |
Scope 1 | 13.4% | 17.5% | 13.1% | 25.0% | 15.1% | 35.8% |
Scope 2 | 48.5% | 32.6% | 49.1% | 2.5% | 59.0% | 2.8% |
Scope 3 | 38.1% | 49.8% | 37.8% | 72.5% | 25.9% | 61.4% |
Total CO2e emissions (FSE) | 28255 tons | 22978 tons | 26642 tons | 16700 tons | 25419 tons | 15996 tons |
Scope 1 | 17.8% | 21.8% | 16.8% | 26.7% | 16.7% | 26.5% |
Scope 2 | 38.4% | 24.3% | 38.3% | 1.6% | 37.8% | 1.7% |
Scope 3 | 43.8% | 53.9% | 44.9% | 71.6% | 45.5% | 72.3% |
# Of publications (FSE)a | 372 | 390 | 498 | |||
Emissions per publication | 76 tons | 62 tons | 68 tons | 43 tons | 51 tons | 32 tons |
Emissions per personb | 10 tons | 8 tons | 9 tons | 6 tons | 9 tons | 6 tons |
Emissions per m2b | 0.20 tons | 0.16 tons | 0.19 tons | 0.12 tons | 0.18 tons | 0.11 tons |
Authors' research related CO2 equivalent emissions in perspective (excluding personal emissions) | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Researcher | Tracked academic career | Number of publications | Average # of coauthors | Estimated CO2e emissions (tons)c | Publications per year | Annual CO2e emissions (tons)c |
Thomas Freese | 2020–2023 | 8 | 8.6 | 63 | 2.7 | 21 |
Nils Elzinga | 2023–2023 | 1 | 14.0 | 4 | 1 | 4 |
Matthias Heinemann | 2002–2023 | 100 | 8.6 | 792 | 4.8 | 38 |
Michael M. Lerch | 2014–2023 | 22 | 6.8 | 221 | 2.4 | 24 |
Ben L. Feringa | 1976–2023 | 1186 | 5.3 | 15258 | 25.2 | 324 |
Annual emissions per capita in Ethiopiad | 0.56 | |||||
Annual emissions per car (12000 km; middle class model)d | 2 | |||||
Paris aligned annual carbon budget (1.5 °C)d | 1.5 |
Not included in the Scope 3 emissions are currently outsourced sustainable data storage at Google©. The UG currently uses 851236.65 GB (17.10.23 at 9 am), which include stored emails by the authors: 2429 by T. Freese, 4002 by N. Elzinga, 791 by M. Heinemann, 30129 by M. M. Lerch, 127000 by B. L. Feringa (up to 26 g CO2e per email).36 Another fact that should be improved in the future is the carbon emissions of the website https://www.rug.nl/. The carbon emissions are related to the data transfer over wire, energy intensity of web data, energy source used by the data centre, carbon intensity of electricity and website traffic. Calculation of the carbon results for the homepage of the University of Groningen results in an energy rating F (https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/rug-nl/), corresponding to being worse than 87% of all web pages globally. Every time someone visits the webpage 1.81 g of CO2 is emitted. Over a year with 10000 monthly page views, https://www.rug.nl/ produces 217.62 kg of CO2e using 492 kW h of energy.99
Efforts by the Green Lab team at the UG led to the measurements of energy consumption of several laboratory devices and equipment. The most energy consumption in laboratories is caused by fume hoods and air ventilation. Measurements at FSE by the Green Lab team revealed that flowrates are reduced from 600 m3 h−1 to 200 m3 h−1 by closing the sash, allowing for less energy required to supply input air.100 Since the implementation of sustainable laboratory efforts 46 freezers were increased in temperature from −80 °C to −70 °C, which saves 81 030 kW h annually equalling to the energy consumption of 27–32 Dutch households. Reducing the acceleration voltages of transmission electron microscopes while being idle (i.e., not in use or overnight) results in 40% less energy consumption. One rotary evaporator consumes 1198 kW h per year, which can be reduced by 56% to 531 kW h by covering the water baths with hollow polypropylene balls.100 Oil baths are frequently utilized for conducting experiments on stirring plates at elevated temperatures. Replacing these oil baths with metal heating blocks reduced their energy consumption by 21%. We further conducted energy measurements on all devices in several individual laboratories (i.e., excluding air ventilation). The whole energy mix consisted of 48% energy usage by two ULT-freezers at −80 °C, 9% by a vacuum concentrator with vapor trap and pump, 8% by one ULT-freezer at −70 °C, 4% by an oven running at 100 °C, and the remaining 31% consisting of several freezers, fridges, ice machines or incubators (Table S38† ESI). A complete list of energy consumption measurements on laboratory devices (balances, ultrasonic baths, vortex, pH meters, oven, freezers, fridges, LEDs and lamps, rotary evaporators, orbital mixer, air conditioning, stirring plates) is reported in Table S37 ESI.†
In 2019, the University launched a new business travel policy, stating that business travel can no longer be done by airplane to and from locations which are within a distance of 500 km and/or can be reached by train within 6 hours. In 2022, this policy was updated to a distance of 800 km and/or 9 hours of travel time. This new, extended travel policy eliminated 24.6% of the short-distance flights, and 6.5% of the total number of flights. On average, this new policy has led to a reduction of 2.5% of the total CO2 emissions of business travel within the University.
Fig. 3C depicts the distance of flights of the UG divided per faculty and its corresponding employees (FTE). Generally, the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) is since 2017 until 2022 by far the biggest contributor to the total of the university's business travel (11000000 km in 2017, 8000000 km in 2019, 5900000 km in 2022, Fig. S9 ESI†). However, when correlated with the number of employees (2889) it performs well with an average distance of 4100 km in 2022. The 3 most visited destinations are Italy, USA, and Spain respectively and the total flight distance of 2022 corresponds to flying 148× around the planet earth. Under the “FSE goes green” program a working group ‘travel behaviour of staff’ has looked specifically into ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to business travel, in particular by airplane. The target reduction is 30% by 2026, in line with the UG sustainability goals. In November 2022, a survey was conducted among all 2889 staff employed by FSE institutes with 362 valid responses, asking about travel behaviour, use of travel agency portal, online vs. physical meetings, awareness about UG mobility policies, and opinions on additional measures for reducing CO2 emissions connected with UG travels. Here two policies to reduce CO2 emission due to business travel were found to be the most acceptable: (1) tracking the annual carbon emission for each institute, and (2) imposing a climate contribution for airplane trips, which is used to subsidize train trips. Further conclusions were closing loopholes in existing policies, making current and planned policies on short-haul flight avoidance well known among staff, encouraging and facilitating online meetings, addressing staff questions and concerns about policies, and making the booking of international train trips easier.
We further gathered business travel data of the authors in the post-pandemic period of February 2022–July 2023. Here flight data cover invited talks, presentations, business meetings abroad and conferences. We already established that air travel increased back to pre-pandemic times from 2022 onwards, thus our data could also be representative for the years 2016–2019. The authors of this article are in different stages of their academic career: T. Freese (PhD candidate), M. M. Lerch (assistant professor), M. Heinemann (full professor), B. L. Feringa (senior professor, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2016). Generally, we observed that the number of flights and emissions increased with seniority: M. M. Lerch with 373 kg CO2e emissions in 19 months has the lowest carbon footprint, with the same number of flights as T. Freese (3025 kg) and M. Heinemann (3056 kg) as CO2 emissions are correlated with flight distances. Due to prominence, international recognition, duties and demand the carbon impact of B. L. Feringa is most probably one of the highest of staff at the University of Groningen with 67 flights and 41626 kg CO2e emissions, thus flying 3.5× per month with CO2e emissions of 2191 kg on average. Hence B. L. Feringa's annual travel related footprint equals 26290 kg CO2e emissions (42 flights per year). Interestingly, when correlated with the 324 tons of total CO2e emissions calculated previously (Table 1), B. L. Feringa's air travel corresponds to 8.11% of his total emissions. However, especially for scientists that are advocates for sustainability, educating audiences about circular, sustainable, or green research findings, there is most probably an optimum between the number of flights taken, their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions avoided by presenting their newest findings.82 Generally, the further researchers progress throughout their career, the more CO2 emissions are generated through air travel annually.
Currently, a European tender for waste management is being organized. The UG's targets for 2025 included in the UG new waste policy are: 95% total waste separation (hazardous and non-hazardous) by 2025 and 15% reduction in the total amount of waste compared to 2020 (from 17 kg to 14 kg per person (staff + students), Fig. 2C). This means that UG is striving to make all non-hazardous waste circular by 2025.
Non-hazardous waste will be re-tendered in 2025. The Schedule of Requirements will include the sustainable processing of waste and a goal of fossil-free waste collection transport from 2023. From 2026, only emission-free logistics will be permitted in the city centre of Groningen and for all UG locations. This is in line with the mobility policy of the municipality of Groningen, whereby logistics in the city centre must be emission-free from 2030 onwards. The UG only works with local companies to recycle or process the separated waste.
Paper is collected in blue bins and then recycled by PreZero©. They wash the paper and break it down to pulp, which is subsequently pressed into new paper or used to manufacture toilet paper. The same process is applied to used paper cups.
Plastic and residual waste goes to Attero©, which puts it through subsequent separation. Separated mono-plastic streams are then recycled by melting and remoulding into new products, where possible. Such recycled plastic is suitable for the production of new bottles, among other uses. Renewi© processes all food and organic waste. This type of waste is used to produce compost, a natural plant fertiliser.
Other residual waste and non-recyclable plastic waste are subjected to subsequent separation by Attero©. Residual waste can be processed through incineration. Waste incineration generates energy, which is captured and reused. Some of the residue that is left after incineration can be used in road construction. However, as of January 1st 2024, a new legislation was applied in the EU affecting UG staff, students and visitors: disposable cups and containers are no longer issued in UG buildings and canteens. The new standard is ‘Bring your own’. If visitors are at UG, it is possible to buy a reusable cup near the coffee machines for €1.
PhD candidates who defend a thesis at the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) can be reimbursed for the printing costs, where the University and the FSE provide this reimbursement. As of February 1st 2024, the reimbursement for printing costs for a PhD thesis was decreased to 750 Euro from the previous 1600 Euro for each PhD candidate. It was observed that PhD candidates often overestimated the number of hard copies of their thesis. As a result, many theses ended up, unopened and unread, in the paper waste. Hence, decreasing the number of theses printed through decreasing reimbursement contributed to making the faculty more sustainable. For general printing the university uses Canon© printers and paper, who pledges that the wood comes from sustainably managed forests and those emissions caused (e.g., transport) are offset by supporting global projects carried out by ClimatePartner©.101
As mentioned, laboratories are located at the Faculty of Science and Engineering focusing on STEM research. In the beginning of 2022, the Green Labs team conducted a case study in a chemistry lab for 5 months involving three representative researchers, where all plastic waste was collected separately. During that time 6.1 kg of gloves, 2.7 kg of syringes and 2.5 kg of packaging material waste was produced (Fig. 4A). These data were extrapolated to 1762 active lab researchers of the 2889 employees of FSE for its annual plastic waste production. According to this extrapolation, roughly 9 tons of glove waste, 4 tons of syringe waste and 4 tons of packaging material waste are produced annually. Thus, at the faculty 1 367 794 individual gloves are used per year (6.59 g per glove). Taken together the laboratories at the Faculty of Science and Engineering produce 17 tons of plastic waste annually. The estimation of plastic waste through this model chemical laboratory becomes accurate as biology/life sciences plastic waste production is underestimated and the production of dry labs (physics, computational science etc.) is overestimated.
We further gathered data from student practical and educational labs for bachelor’s and master’s students studying at FSE. A typical course for chemical education (Synthesis 1) is running for 15 days with about 130 students. The plastic waste as well as the chemical waste production of student education was tracked for one semester of 6 months (Fig. 4B and ESI†). The data in Fig. 4B indicate the drastic numbers of plastic waste production covering disposable tubes, cuvettes, caps, Eppendorf© cups, gloves, pipettes, and pipette tips. Here neoprene gloves in sizes L and M (52000 and 57000, respectively) cover a vast amount of plastic waste. Pipette tips are only used in 2 weeks of biological practical and are producing waste of a total of 45000.
When compared to the total plastic waste production of a research laboratory focusing on molecular biology (Heinemann research group, Fig. 4B), these values can be put more into perspective: in 2022 the group of M. Heinemann produced 533 kg of plastic waste in total. In a biochemistry lab, where most activities involve molecular experiments using Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli, all types of plastics were weighed and summed up based on the number of orders placed over a year. We calculated that a lab consisting of 17 active lab members uses 533 kg of plastic consumables per year. This is 2.6 kg of tubes, tips, plates, syringes, and other plastics per person per month (31.3 kg per person per year). Residents in the EU produce an average of 34.6 kilogram of plastic waste annually, indicating that the researchers double their annual plastic impact through research activities.102 Going back to the plastic waste production of a chemical laboratory, the numbers from Fig. 4A can be calculated to 0.8 kg of gloves, syringes and packaging material per person per month, thus 9.4 kg of plastic waste production per person per year. Hence chemical research roughly produced a third of plastic waste when compared to biological research.
The biochemical research of the Heinemann group (17 members) produced a waste amount of 43000 individual gloves in 2022, equalling to 7 gloves per person per day. Student education however corresponded to 298000 gloves per year (149000 gloves, 6 months), which equals to 23 gloves per student per day. These amounts are 6.9× times higher than the annual glove usage in a research group. While the Heinemann research group used 144000 pipette tips in 2022, the student education with their 2 weeks biological practical produced a total of 45000 in two weeks, which equals to 90000 pipette tips per year if extrapolated (7 pipette tips per student per day). These values clearly indicate that sustainable laboratory practices such as switching to reusable glass alternatives are having a drastic and direct effect on student education, not only via mindset for a paradigm shift, but also on waste production and related hazardous waste costs.
The Faculty of Science and Engineering also produces hazardous chemical waste as disposed solvents, liquids, or hazardous solid waste (solid chemicals or contaminated single use consumables). In Fig. 5 the hazardous chemical waste production is depicted. The amount of commercial and hazardous waste is expressed in Fig. 5A in total amount of kg and in EPI (kg per m2 of floor area). The cumulative scores for waste are provided for all the buildings managed by FSE (Nijenborgh 4 (NB4), Bernoulliborg, Energy Academy Europe, Location Zernikelaan 25 and Linnaeusborg (LB and NB7)) with a total floor area of 131302 m2. Fig. 5B depicts the waste production per building, where NB4 covers the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen (ENTEG), the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials (ZIAM) and parts of the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute (GBB). In NB7 most of the research of GBB is taking place as well as all research of the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES). Some laboratories of the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry are also located at NB7. Generally, it can be assumed that most chemical research is taking place at NB4, whereas most biological research takes place at NB7 (with some cross-sections of laboratories). Through the STEM research taking place at FSE the annual hazardous chemical waste production has been increasing since 2018 from 61400 kg to 108987 kg. Here especially NB4 and NB7 are the main production locations for chemical waste, where since 2020 all numbers have been increasing. The chemical waste of the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry (150 staff members) increased from 40990 kg in 2020 to 82661 kg in 2022. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 the amount of chemical waste increased with lockdown measures in place. The same trend is visible in NB7, where the numbers increased from 9876 kg (2020) to 26272 kg (2022). Thus, in both NB4 and NB7, the amount of hazardous waste has increased significantly. A major cause is the fact that since the beginning of 2021, the Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) department has initiated a major clean-up operation to dispose old chemicals, which is still being continued as of the time of writing. This operation started in NB4 in 2021 and in the beginning of 2022 also in the Linnaeusborg NB7, and it probably will continue until mid-2024, the reason being the already mentioned construction of the new building (Feringa Building) and the correlated move of the laboratories, where old, unused, and dangerous chemicals are being disposed of and not taken to the new facilities. In the LB, renovation of upper floors has been completed in 2021 and an organic chemical group has moved in, explaining the increase in hazardous waste in the LB.
After covering the chemical waste production of the faculty (Fig. 5A), with accuracy to each department and building (Fig. 5B), it is possible to zoom further into the research groups of the authors: Fig. 5C covers the chemical waste production per research group, where the Feringa group is located in both NB4 and NB7. In 2021 the Feringa group was home to 45 active researchers in the laboratories. The same year the Stratingh Institute at NB4 and NB7 produced a total of 69938 kg of chemical waste, of which the Feringa group caused 7071 kg, equalling to 10% of the total waste production. With 45 laboratory members, the total hazardous chemical waste production of 7071 kg corresponds to 157 kg per person per year.
The previously introduced student education laboratories are also located at NB4. There the chemical and solvent waste production can also be used to give further perspective to these numbers (Fig. 5D): one student uses 72 L acetone (56 kg), 22 L of ethanol (96%, 18 kg), 12 L of diethyl ether (8 kg) and 10 L of pentane (6 kg) per year. In contrast to plastic waste production when compared to biological research, student education produces only about 62% hazardous chemical waste per person per year when compared to research laboratories (97 kg vs. 157 kg per person annually).
Fig. 6 Our path to greener labs. Chronology of improvements to laboratory efficiency at UG and FSE, the reduced carbon impact and annual savings. |
At the “Stratingh Day” in June 2022, which is an institute-wide annual celebration and team building event, the Green Lab group, and external speakers on laboratory efficiency from Green Labs NL were invited to educate the whole institute of the importance and upcoming intentions to improve laboratory sustainability. During the same time, members from the Green Lab team joined several (online-)conferences organized by Green Labs NL, the Sustainable European Laboratories Network (SELs) and Green Labs Austria. There, more information was gathered as well as international support, evidence, resources, and network allowing for further growth of the grassroots movement. In the summer of 2022, the FSE launched the “FSE is going green” program, a framework through which funding became available and a managing board was established. In that board the Green Lab team was invited for a permanent seat. With funding for sustainable actions now being available, it was agreed to join the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) in October 2022 after sufficient evidence for its importance was presented.
The Green Lab team established one of its members as a LEAF coordinator (T. Freese), who contacted founder M. Farley and the University College London to join the accreditation framework. The group received a training on the software as well as auditing and ran a pilot among the 6 active laboratories of the original Green Team members. In November 2022 the first two laboratories achieved silver accreditation (Feringa and Lerch group), whereas 4 additional laboratories successfully passed an audit for reaching the bronze level (Fig. 6). Together with staff from FSE and Green Lab members official door signs and awards were created under the banner of University of Groningen, recognizing its official accreditation. At an award ceremony in February 2023, the managing director of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, together with the dean, recognized and appreciated these efforts and awarded the 6 laboratories personally with their respective awards. To these award ceremonies all staff of FSE were invited to further expand the momentum and LEAF framework through QR-codes and sign-up documents. Through regular engagement via faculty and institute newsletters, regularly highlighting the progress and efforts of the Green Lab team, a steady growth of LEAF participants as well as Green Labs was achieved. With every expansion to new laboratories and institutes new interested members joined the core group and subgroups of Green Labs RUG, achieving continuity when staff or students left the university. This continuity is a crucial aspect of the success of a grassroots movement, to include PIs and staff with permanent contracts as soon as possible to achieve a steady foundation of a group.
After the first award ceremony the LEAF engagement grew and hence a team of “LEAF administrators” was assembled to increase the efficiency of laboratory audits. While dates, lengths, details and how to conduct an audit were organized through the LEAF coordinator, the LEAF administrator team became an important group of well-educated researchers and technicians on laboratory efficiency. As more laboratories were joining the framework official, unified stickers and posters were printed to close fume hoods when not in use or turn-off equipment, which were distributed among signed up laboratories. The design of the stickers was coordinated again with the Green Office together with Green Lab members, and funding achieved through the “FSE goes green” program.
Another major achievement was the inclusion of all student education laboratories for chemical, pharmaceutical and biological research (wet laboratories). Through support by the coordinator, lecturers and teaching assistants measured plastic and chemical waste production in student laboratories, organized the distribution of stickers and posters to turn off equipment and took part actively in auditing other laboratories. Rapidly, all student laboratories were working towards bronze and later silver accreditation. This was only possible because the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry were already a core part of the bachelors and masters curriculum at the University of Groningen.103 With the successful silver accreditation of these 15 educational laboratories in October 2023, bachelor’s and master’s students are directly familiarized with concepts of sustainable laboratories. Perceiving this way of conducting experiments as standard, these students will automatically carry forward a more sustainable approach when joining research groups in the future for their research projects and or PhD theses, this way automatically expanding the Green Lab and LEAF framework into every research laboratory of the faculty. Another advantage is that teaching assistants in those educational labs are current PhD candidates, fulfilling their required teaching duty. As part of their preparation and training, these PhD candidates are educated about the sustainable goals, content and practices that need to be transferred as knowledge to the students. PhD candidates from research groups that are not familiar with sustainable laboratory practices or LEAF yet are automatically joining a lab for a certain amount of time, which is accredited with LEAF silver, then learning and applying those rules to transfer those to the students present in that laboratory. After the course is finished these PhD candidates continue with their own research in their respective research groups and may want to improve their laboratory practices within their own research group as well.
The efforts of the Green Lab team were further expanded and piloted from May 2023 until November 2023: the digital and dry labs of the faculty were included to assess their carbon impact and sustainability efforts, which included computational science, artificial intelligence, and mathematics. Two PIs of these research fields joined the Green Lab RUG team, and one was assigned as the coordinator of dry lab efficiency. Together with a local team of five (including the LEAF coordinator), an international pilot was completed to establish an accreditation framework with categories covering bronze, silver, and gold for dry labs specifically. All learnings, findings and recommendations were published in the guidebook of the Green Lab RUG team and the first dry lab achieved bronze in October 2023.
The Green Lab and LEAF engagement was recently able to include the activities of several institutes of FSE covering disciplines such as biology, chemistry, chemical engineering, computational sciences, life sciences or pharmacy. These efforts resulted ultimately in 46 accredited laboratories in October 2023, 17 of which achieved LEAF silver and 29 reached the LEAF bronze level (including disciplines such as chemistry, chemical engineering, biology, life sciences, pharmacy). At another award ceremony (which always includes social gatherings for networking and outreach), an art exhibition was organized. Here the hidden waste of research was put in focus, where staff and artists were able to exhibit pieces highlighting the impact of laboratories on the planet. The plastic waste collected from the chemical laboratory (Fig. 4) was gathered to be displayed as art resembling a big syringe or a flower made from gloves (2.7.8 ESI†). Drawing attention to glass waste, art pieces made from laboratory glass waste were displayed next to a large number of discarded, clean and unused laboratory coats. During Summer 2023 a movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk_CEmyHZZg) was made to highlight the environmental impact of laboratories to be used in social media and outreach, which was also shown and distributed since at the award ceremony, which took place during the Sustainability week organized by the Green Office RUG. There again, the dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering awarded each laboratory with their respective award and all photos were shared in a news article of FSE, UG, and the Stratingh Institute afterwards. Finally, in February 2024 the efforts of the Green Lab team and LEAF were expanded to the University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG) to improve laboratory practices in hospitals.104
Next to LEAF, several other subgroups achieved further successes: funding for the replacement of inefficient laboratory equipment was administered through “FSE goes green”, which led to faculty wide energy measurements and applications. Already in 2022, the Green Lab team started to work on ULT-freezers, which included measurement of energy consumption for all −80 °C freezers of the faculty (52 freezers operated and 46 measured). Subsequently, their temperature was increased to −70 °C (40–46 freezers increased in temperature, savings of 81 030 kW h annually). Freezers with undesired energy consumption (21) and age were first checked for their maintenance, and if sufficient replaced with energy friendly and newer models (6). Increasing freezer temperatures and replacing inefficient ones were further reported and submitted to the 2023 Freezer Challenge105 by My Green Lab©, which ultimately led to a total of 20.7 million kW h of energy saved and thus avoiding 14663 tons of CO2e. In 2023 more than 2000 laboratories participated and since the launch of the challenge 44.7 million kW h worth of energy equalling CO2 emissions of 31678 tons was saved, which corresponds to the energy consumed by roughly 6164 homes in one year. In 2023 more than 26000 cold storage units and 170 organizations joined the efforts.106
Because laboratory buildings consume large amounts of energy, an annual winter break and building closure was implemented at the end of 2021. For financial and environmental reasons, all buildings of the faculty were closed for a full two weeks and all laboratory equipment, computers, office equipment, machines and devices were turned off and unplugged, if possible to do so, to reduce energy consumption. Heating was reduced and flow rates of fume hoods reduced or turned off. In the break of 2022–2023 the energy savings were further accelerated through communication and engagement by the Green Lab team: in the years from 2018 to 2021 the total energy consumption at FSE was on average 1019461 kW h of electricity and 160489 m3 of gas during a two-week winter break, which is already much lower when compared to the average monthly consumption at FSE (2.7.4 ESI†). However, with Green Labs RUG we were able to further increase these efforts in the break of 2022–2023 with improved energy consumption of 798977 kW h electricity and 102333 m3 of gas, generating additional savings of 221 kW h and 58 m3 when compared to previous years, corresponding to additional cost savings of 117959 € and 129687 € respectively. In the break of 2023–2024 measures such as turning off 8 out of 12 fume hoods per laboratory in old buildings such as NB4 resulted in drastic additional savings of at least 48000 € of electricity and 200000 € of saved heating costs. Capitalizing on this success, we are currently investigating possibilities to turn off fume hoods when not in use, if ensured that all containers stored underneath are closed.25
In particular, for old buildings energy efficiency could be increased by retrofitting windows with insulation films, which increase heat gain by 55% and reduce heat loss by up to 40%, leading to lower usage of heating and cooling systems and ultimately reduce costs on energy bills. A coordinated effort among the whole NB4 (including the Stratingh Institute and GBB) provided a low-cost solution and quick installation of the films by laboratory researchers.
Another focus of the Green Lab RUG team is the reduction of waste production from laboratories: uncontaminated plastic waste and normal packaging (laboratory packaging plastics) can be disposed of as PD/PMD (plastics, metals, drinks) in regular recycling streams of the University, which is transported to Attero©. Also, styrofoam boxes are collected at central locations and recycled through take-back schemes.107 All LEAF bronze and higher accredited laboratories conduct these measures.
Gloves can be downcycled to furniture or gardening products through companies such as Terracycle©,108 but utilizing these schemes results in higher costs than burning as hazardous solid waste with PreZero™: currently, the costs for incineration of gloves are 1.23 € per kg. At FSE, of the 2889 employees, 1762 active lab researchers (1300 PhDs/postdocs/technicians and 462 guest researchers) produce 9 tons of glove waste annually (Fig. 4). Thus incineration would cost 11 080€ per year, but downcycling would lead to additional 36 085 € needed (total of 47 166 € annually per 9 tons transported in 137 boxes of 144 L or 66 kg at a price of 344 € per box).
Take-back schemes to original suppliers and manufacturers should be prioritized in all cases. Comparable, fully circular schemes exist for gloves through, e.g., Gloovy© (https://gloovyecogloves.nl/en) eco gloves, which is currently being piloted at the University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG) and the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry. Here new gloves are produced from the glove plastic waste that is taken back from the laboratories (if uncontaminated).
Circular take-back schemes also exist for pipette tip boxes, where there are several models available and investigated by the Green Lab team for a university-wide coordination. In the future the goal is to include falcon tubes and pipette tips.
Companies such as Grenova©109 offer pipette tip dishwashers for washing and reusing pipette tips (25–40 times per tip).107 A pilot investigation and calculation by the Green Labs team led to the conclusion that buying a Grenova© pipette tip dishwasher for the educational laboratories of FSE was not feasible due to the high amounts of solvent needed for cleaning (based on ethanol); if water and soap would be utilized it became feasible. Another pilot on autoclaving plastic syringes from a chemical laboratory for reuse in a chemical environment concluded that syringes were not clean enough as residues of chemicals or water were observed which could interfere with chemical reactions (Fig. S27, ESI†).
The waste stream subgroup of our Green Lab team is investigating several aspects to implement circular recycling schemes. Next to the glove pilot together with the UMCG, a take-back scheme pilot program110 by Merck© and Sigma-Aldrich© is ongoing.
Currently, a solvent recycling program is being investigated as a pilot program, where the Green Lab team plans to distill and recycle solvents such as acetone, methanol, or ethanol to reduce the amount of liquid hazardous waste.25 Previous reports show that these solvents could be reused for cleaning of glassware (and perhaps even making the pipette tip dishwashing feasible in educational laboratories).
Glass and flasks are washed and autoclaved at several locations within the faculty and university. Thus, switching from plastic consumables to glass alternatives is most recommended as it is better than any plastic recycling, as no waste is produced whatsoever.
Starting from March 2024, the Green Labs group implemented a marketplace for second hand laboratory equipment to reduce the number of devices that are disposed of and support groups with less income. Through LabMakelaar (https://www.labmakelaar.com/) devices are refurbished (i.e., repaired, calibrated, and tested for functionality) and then transported to customers (2.7.7, ESI†).
Being in line with the cancellation of all disposable (coffee) cups at UG and their catering services, staff members had the option to obtain a collapsible and thus transportable cup together with a mug as Christmas present in 2023.
From 2024 onwards we are investigating to reduce the energy consumption in office spaces: if all 6390 employees of the UG have at least one computer screen (i.e., monitor) in their office (excluding multiple screens), annual savings of 23324 € and 86297 kW h less energy consumption can be achieved if all employees would reduce their screen brightness from 100% to 75% (equivalent to the annual energy consumption of 27–35 Dutch households).
As of March 2024, the construction of the Feringa Building (2.6.1, ESI†) was completed which allowed for a reduced carbon impact associated with laboratory research of the former building (Fig. S10,† ESI). All laboratories were built on the north side of each wing, keeping the impact of sunlight to a minimum. The chemical, biochemical and physics laboratories are flexible and interchangeable as each one can be connected separately to the ventilation, power, and gas supply networks. Further sustainability aspects include:
- Optimal insulation.
- Heat reflective coating (HR) glass.
- 900 m2 solar panels (±120000 WP (watt-peak) of nominal power).
- LED lights in addition to natural daylight.
- Gasless heating.
- Geothermal heating and cooling system with heat pumps.
- Energy saving, automated closing fume hoods.
- 4 courtyards to enhance biodiversity.
Other achievements at FSE were the opening of a canteen (Bernoulli's Bistro, Fig. S14,† ESI) utilizing fresh and local ingredients, creating a completely vegetarian and at least 50% plant-based menu. In addition to a more sustainable menu, reusable cutlery is used, and sustainable packaging materials are prioritized. Plants on tables in the canteen were grown free of pesticides and live in second-hand pots. Other projects from “FSE goes green” also aim to improve and preserve biodiversity on the campus grounds (Fig. S15, ESI†).111 Currently, the team is further looking into the aspects of implementing more solar panels on the university buildings and parking areas and switching to green energy providers.112
Through their time and work for Green Lab RUG, some core members became Green Lab Ambassadors (https://www.mygreenlab.org/ambassador-program.html) expanding their reach beyond their own institute, faculty or university: members of the Green Lab RUG team were invited at international conferences as guest speakers to educate about laboratory sustainability and improvements. Outreach to other universities and institutes is a common aspect of the work of Green Lab members, where several presentations, meetings, newspaper interviews or media outlets are given on a regular basis to educate the scientific community about the relevance of sustainable laboratory practices (2.7.10, ESI†). Here outreach about laboratory sustainability and efficiency goes hand-in-hand with the principles of green and circular chemistry.113–115 Within the UG this outreach currently covers initiatives for improved laboratories in the departments of astronomy, physics, and materials science. In December 2023 the work and efforts have been concluded and published in the mentioned guidebook,100 which is often recommended together with the movie116 during outreach, external meetings or interviews to support future efforts of other universities or companies.
Over the past two years a well-organized Green Lab RUG team was established, which successfully grew out of the “grassroots-stage” into an established organization within the faculty with meetings every 4–6 weeks. Through their work, savings, and success the faculty hired in Summer 2023 a full-time energy and sustainability advisor with laboratory experience to join and support the Green Labs team and their efforts.
The current organogram of the Green Lab RUG team can be found in Fig. S17, ESI.† One member is assigned as chair of the group, who takes part at the “FSE goes green” meetings, is the main coordinator and administrator of the group, and contacts the Green Office or other institutes for expansion or support. Then the core Green Lab group consists of 8–10 members (staff, PIs, PhD candidates and students) covering the topics:
- Secretary (minutes, action points, communication).
- Energy, facilities, freezers, and fridges.
- LEAF coordinator.
- SELs and Green Labs NL communication.
- Laboratory waste: single-use plastics and solvents.
- Education, student practical, curriculum.
- Dry labs and computation science.
- Funding.
- Community meetings, award ceremonies, webpage, newsletters, and outreach.
Next to the full-time energy and sustainability advisor, a permanent member of the Green Office of the UG is present at the Green Lab meetings. Almost every core member covering these topics has a team of 5–10 subgroup members (e.g., LEAF coordinator with LEAF administrators), who evaluate and establish solutions for detailed waste problems, conduct LEAF audits, support energy measurements, improve student education, or organize the webpage and award ceremonies.
As of October 2023, the Green Lab RUG team was able to achieve successful accreditation of 46 laboratories; 17 of those laboratories were accredited with silver and 29 with LEAF bronze. According to the calculators of the LEAF software, the reduced carbon impact of those 46 laboratories is equalling annual savings of 398763 € as well as 477107 kg of CO2 (Fig. 6, 10372 kg of CO2 and 8669 € per lab per year). While these numbers are already very impressive and engaging, the impact of the Green Lab RUG team is even higher as measurements and replacement of inefficient laboratory equipment (50000 kW h annually, 2.7.3 ESI†), the increase of ULT-freezer temperatures from −80 °C to −70 °C (81 030 kW h annually, Table S36, ESI†), and the savings during the winter closures (247646 € per year, Table S41, ESI†) are not included in those calculations.
- By having standard operating procedures (SOPs) and frameworks to share negative results, there is greater reproducibility and less need for repeating experiments.
- As solvents or chemicals are shared and where possible recycled, there is no need to buy as frequently.
- Sharing equipment and lab spaces reduces the energy consumption and costs.
- Turning off equipment when idle minimizes energy consumption and associated costs.
- Production of less hazardous waste consequently leads to reduction of costs of disposal.
- Switching to reusable glass alternatives over single-use consumables reduces waste and procurement.
It is evident that these changes are reducing the carbon impact of laboratories, but they also lead to considerable savings in research expenses. There are several examples that laboratories save up to 15800 € per year, shrink their non-chemical waste by more than 95% and reduce the single-use plastics consumption by 69%.19,52,118 For instance, 4000 kg of waste produced by seven staff members per year could be reduced down to 130 kg by avoiding single-use plastics and recycling.19,52 Hazardous chemical waste was reduced by 23% equalling 300 L per year and the electricity consumption of an institute with a size of 11000 m2 was reduced by 26%.19 By recycling solvents such as acetone annual savings of 3527 € were achieved at the University of Colorado, which are further increased by savings on disposal costs for hazardous waste.119,120 A program to regularly close fume hoods at Harvard University saves the university 183000 € annually.33 These efforts were expanded by routinely sharing leftover chemicals, equipment and materials through a campus-wide initiative – saving a combined total of 250000 € per year.121 Stanford University operated in 2008 about 2000 −80 °C freezers, which were costing the university between €5.6 and 6.2 million euros per year to operate, thus increasing the temperature to −70 °C resulted in drastic savings.122 Some departments saved through bulk purchasing and recycling of solvents another 195000 € per year.121 At the University of Colorado green initiatives provide cost avoidance of 231000 € per year.120 Through our actions at UG we have been able to save 10372 kg of CO2 and 8669 € per lab per year. Thus, implementing ecological awareness into the laboratory can save up to 40% of a researcher's funding over one year.123 Environmental sustainability is often thought of as expensive, but by incorporating these strategies less chemicals, paper, energy, or plastics are used.124 The savings generated outperform by far the small initial costs of implementing sustainability measures such as buying filters or setting up a recycling scheme. Furthermore, the money saved can be reinvested back into research.
It is worth noting that calling these efforts “sustainable” is a luxury of developed countries and well-funded research institutes. In other regions of the planet, these sustainable efforts have long been standard, as they are proven to be the better economic option. There, researchers conduct their research in the most economical way possible, without calling it sustainable. Visiting researchers from those areas are often surprised by the other, more wasteful, working culture, and scientists can improve their sustainability efforts drastically by learning from other countries' well-established standards.
Reduced resource consumption not only translates to direct cost reduction but also to optimized funding allocation: sustainable laboratories are more likely to receive funding for research projects, as they are optimizing every aspect of their research including carbon footprint, efficiency, and productivity. Operating green labs can make the difference in receiving funding for certain projects and are powerful tools to maximize the impact of proposals.120 In fact, more and more funding agencies incorporate sustainability into their assessment criteria, making it necessary to meet those in our research institutes.
Resources |
---|
(1) Sustainable laboratories (https://www.rsc.org/policy-evidence-campaigns/environmental-sustainability/sustainability-reports-surveys-and-campaigns/sustainable-laboratories/) (report by the Royal Society of Chemistry) |
(2) Wellcome report (https://wellcome.org/reports/advancing-environmentally-sustainable-health-research): advancing environmentally sustainable health research |
(3) A guidebook for sustainability in laboratories (https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2023-g3lmq-v4) |
(4) Allea report (https://allea.org/portfolio-item/towards-climate-sustainability-of-the-academic-system-in-europe-and-beyond/): towards climate sustainability of the academic system in Europe and beyond |
(5) CaRe 2021: catalogue of recommendations for sustainability in the Max Planck society https://doi.org/10.17617/1.mpsn.2021.01 |
Sustainability in science Wiki https://sustainability.wiki.gwdg.de/ |
Networks | Region | |
---|---|---|
Green Your Lab | United States and Global | http://greenyourlab.org/ |
Sustainable European Laboratories (SELs) | Europe | https://sels-network.org/ |
Max Planck Sustainability Network | Germany | https://www.nachhaltigkeitsnetzwerk.mpg.de/ |
Green Labs NL | Netherlands | https://www.greenlabs-nl.eu/ |
Laboratory Efficiency Action Network (LEAN) | United Kingdom | https://www.lean-science.org/ |
Green Labs Austria | Austria | https://greenlabsaustria.at/ |
Sustainable Labs Canada | Canada | https://slcan.ca/ |
Labos 1point5 | France | https://labos1point5.org/ |
Green Labs Portugal | Portugal | https://greenlabs.pt/ |
Irish Green Labs | Ireland | https://irishgreenlabs.org/ |
Accreditation frameworks and schemes | |
---|---|
Green Impact | https://greenimpact.nus.org.uk/ |
Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) | https://www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable/leaf-laboratory-efficiency-assessment-framework |
My Green Lab certification | https://www.mygreenlab.org/green-lab-certification.html |
GreenED Framework for Environmentally Sustainable Emergency Medicine and Health Care | https://greened.rcem.ac.uk/ |
Framework for building sustainability and green building rating: LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) | https://www.usgbc.org/leed |
Non-profit organizations | |
---|---|
International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL) | https://i2sl.org/ |
My Green Lab | https://www.mygreenlab.org/ |
Beyond Benign | https://www.beyondbenign.org/ |
Green chemistry | |
---|---|
American Chemical Society and the ACS Green Chemistry Institute | https://www.acs.org/greenchemistry.html |
Green Chemistry Teaching and Learning Community (GCTLC) | https://gctlc.org/ |
NMR impurities of solvents and emerging green solvents | http://www.nmrimpurities.com/ |
Dry labs and computational science | ||
---|---|---|
Green Algorithms | Carbon and energy calculator | https://www.green-algorithms.org/ |
Other tools and resources | ||
---|---|---|
Labconscious | Open resource database | https://www.labconscious.com/ |
Laboratory Benchmarking Tool | Carbon and energy calculator | https://lbt.i2sl.org/ |
GES 1point5 | Carbon and energy calculator | https://apps.labos1point5.org/ges-1point5 |
The Caring Scientist | Podcast | https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/caring-scientist |
Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education | Resources, network, framework on sustainability performance | https://www.aashe.org/ |
Travel | |
---|---|
Carbon offsetting to research on sustainable jet fuels | https://www.atmosfair.de/en/ |
Calculation tool on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in passenger transport | https://ecopassenger.org/ |
Information can be further obtained through networks such as Green Your Lab (http://greenyourlab.org/) or the Sustainable European Laboratories Network (https://sels-network.org/), as well as through non-profit organizations such as the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (https://www.i2sl.org/). I2SL organizes an annual conference, provides workshops and resources. Similarly My Green Lab© (http://www.mygreenlab.org/) as a non-profit organization provides information, organizes the annual freezer challenge (https://www.freezerchallenge.org/), educates through their ambassador program (https://www.mygreenlab.org/ambassador-program.html), and has certification (https://www.mygreenlab.org/green-lab-certification.html) programs for laboratories as well as for products through their ACT©label (https://act.mygreenlab.org/). Another option is Labconscious© (https://www.labconscious.com/), which constitutes a blog offering advice on laboratory waste, green chemistry, energy and water, while also facilitating networking to other networks and groups.
For very detailed information with hands-on advice, proof and additional measurements, we recommend our Guidebook for Sustainability in Laboratories100 (Table 2, entry 3). There researchers will find more details on measures that can be undertaken in laboratories of any kind. Thus, our previously published guidebook is complementary to this article and together a comprehensive review on laboratory sustainability is presented with a great number of actions to improve laboratory efficiency.
Ideally, a Green Lab grassroots group for sustainability advocacy is formed, which has several benefits:
- Identifying and implementing possible measures is much easier in a familiar setting.
- There is an existing relationship with colleagues, hence a network to work within.
This way scientists can connect with each other, exchange ideas and distribute tasks. Sustainable laboratory practices will be possible to be implemented right from the start, as individual actions do not need much convincing or communication with other stakeholders.8
As soon as a group of researchers is formed it is wise to connect with other Green Lab teams across the globe to exchange information and share experiences. There are several networks out there ranging from regional, national to international and global (see Table 2; Green Your Lab (http://greenyourlab.org/), SELs (https://sels-network.org/), Green Labs NL (https://www.greenlabs-nl.eu/), etc.). These networks organize symposia and educational workshops, provide information, and create a sense of community. As every university or institution started at some point, connecting with other Green Teams can provide further valuable information. Obtaining national and international support, exchanging advice, ideas and resources avoid duplication efforts. Building or joining a network improves workflows locally, nationally, and internationally. It also provides a sense of community, which can help to overcome certain obstacles regarding laboratory sustainability (Section 4.3). Ultimately, a transformative change towards sustainability requires collective action.125
For further success, it is important to include senior staff (PIs and technicians) with full time contracts as soon as possible, as they provide institutional weight and leverage to a grassroots initiative while also providing stability and continuity over time. Grassroots initiatives in academia face high staff turnover and because some scientists are more engaged with sustainability and environmental actions than others, ongoing pilot studies, calculations or policy changes towards sustainable practices may fizzle out as soon as key members leave.5 Therefore it is crucial that grassroots groups are supported on an institutional level (i.e., management and organization), enjoying top-down support and especially include senior staff and PIs. The reach of sustainable laboratory practices is then able to grow and sustained through different institutions, even when members depart.7
This growing network often comes with the benefit that more members are joining, decreasing the individual task load but creating a stronger team, being able to act and exert influence across boards and hierarchy.5 Involving senior staff sends a strong signal to an organization on the importance of sustainability. Experienced colleagues can bring valuable, alternative perspectives, the opportunity to facilitate investments and power to change policies.8 This way sustainability becomes part of the agenda of various committees and allows for a holistic and realistic approach.3,5 By educating students and incoming staff directly with sustainable laboratory practices and science, a cultural change and paradigm shift is achieved. This institutional change and acceptance will facilitate the implementation of future actions while ensuring continuity.7
Effectively the initiative is then growing to a more organized arrangement, where the team gathers every 6–8 weeks, having a structured agenda, meeting notes and action points. It is also recommended to embrace a subgroup system, where not the whole green team but parts of it focus in separate subgroups on subtasks that require more time:
- Waste and plastic recycling.
- Accreditation standard programs.
- Energy measurements and efficiency.
- Outreach and communication.
Through this approach the organization and actions are structured and thus are more likely to be adopted by senior staff, thereby influencing policies and managing structures of a university or company.8
Top-down support is essential for further growth and requires active communication with management and governing bodies. To achieve top-down support, gathering data or evidence in support of planned changes, evidence of cutting costs, and a clear path to carbon neutrality are essential. Here universities or companies need to acknowledge that they ultimately will save money and need to reach carbon neutrality, so supporting these grassroots initiatives will be of great benefit and deliver a business case. Sustainability or green offices are often the first point of contact at universities and can assess carbon footprints and aid in the development of roadmaps to achieve carbon neutrality. These administrative and managing offices often align with goals for sustainable laboratory practices and Green Labs and hence will accelerate institutional change.7 Navigating the political nature of a large research organization will help researchers acquire further interpersonal and management skills, in addition to a better understanding of organizations and funding landscapes. Automatically these scientists will obtain transferable skills outside of research practices, which are desired in economy and society, especially in view of the training aspects for young researchers for future industrial and societal jobs. By achieving top-down support the initial grassroots movement can grow very fast to a recognized project within an organization and implement changes on a large scale.
Institutional support will provide access to budgets for events, workshops, and other activities to enhance sustainability within the institution. Furthermore, Green Lab grassroots initiatives should be granted funding to replace inefficient laboratory equipment and implement changes. The resulting green cost savings should be reinvested into the fund, allowing for extended sustainable measures through a steady self-filling income to the green team budget.5
Successful top-down support ultimately translates into a seat at management meetings, allowing for discussing institute-wide issues and making decisions, especially when related to sustainability. This can be achieved through hiring a sustainability manager at institutes or research organizations to support, promote and implement the ideas and evidence-based recommendations of the Green Lab team.1,5 Appointing a sustainability manager at the department or higher level facilitates a coordinated strategy on sustainability and meeting self-imposed targets of an institution.
One may ask, why a grassroots approach often is recommended as effective: virtually every sustainability action or movement started out of personal drive and dedication. Actions are undertaken in the free time of an individual and lead to demand. The identification of potential improvements is often directly visible to employees in their own working environment, which are less obvious for management.7 Then people demand change from the bottom-up, become a lobby and then are heard. As grassroots groups are more agile than big institutions, exploration and piloting of new procedures and practices become easier, which then can be presented to the management as soon as they are established.7
With the urgency of the climate crisis and necessity for a sustainable future scientists should not wait for an institution or company to change top-down but initiate efficient transformation as soon as possible. When top-down enforcements or bottom-up demands are met alone, they usually create tensions or face rejection.7 Utilizing the best of both worlds, bottom-up grassroots movements should be top-down supported, meeting each other in the middle to accelerate and enhance common sustainability goals for institutional change. The whole Green Lab initiative and its success is based on a bottom-up approach and leads to evidence-based research, changes in funding criteria, cost savings, waste reduction and improvements of products.
In particular, because humans like to stay in their comfort zone, having a reluctant attitude to going beyond current frontiers, there will be resistance to action, which at times can feel frustrating for a researcher promoting sustainable actions. It is important to focus on a positive dialogue: in cases where the environment is a polarizing topic, the communication should be focusing on co-benefits such as costs or health. If a policy change at a workplace is the ultimate goal, the focus should be to maintain good relationships with co-workers and accepting smaller changes rather than winning an argument over a bigger one. Constructive dialogs and positive relationships will be a good investment in the long term.
Feeling frustration with colleagues and peers should not discourage a certain grassroots movement or scientist to demand change. Such feelings can be overcome by realizing a sense of community through conversations with like-minded scientists, friends, and colleagues. The climate crisis and biodiversity loss can feel remote or impersonal to some people, leading them to rather act locally on direct needs within their own barriers. Information alone often falls short in driving behavioural shifts. People are always looking for information that aligns with their personal values, aspects that resonate with their own identity.127 Taking the time to listen and having empathy leads to understanding of certain motivations. Here effective communication while engaging with other people is key to achieve behavioural changes and to keep people on board.
Individual researchers can implement and influence sustainable actions on different levels. Next to personal actions, these practices should be part of their teaching, communication with colleagues and ultimately encourage groups and institutions to adopt these changes; we owe it to the young talents we educate for their future. Engagement in public debates will further accelerate sustainable scientific research.7
When it comes to policy changes, funding, or procurement we recommend developing an evidence-based plan on sustainable laboratory actions. These can only be granted when recommendations are backed up with not only white papers or publications from other institutions, but also with calculations on their ‘business-case’ by in-house measurements and numbers highlighting the benefits. Often sustainability efforts save costs and are in-line with climate goals of a company or university (see Section 4.1 Benefits of Green Labs). These technical solutions, however, should be communicated with a certain understanding of diplomacy to facilitate and stimulate institutional change.7 Ultimately, having an institutional policy with stated goals and SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) targets is a useful driver for change.128
Importantly, success stories create momentum for the next desired change. These successes should be communicated through newsletters of the institute, faculty, university, or companies. This way work is acknowledged and endorsed, resulting in people being more likely to join the grassroots movement and its visible impact is publicly supported by the management.5 The momentum generated keeps up engagement and opens doors for the next step. Here regular talks and presentations at institute meetings on the topic of laboratory sustainably by staff and invited speakers encourage wider actions and support recruitment of new members.5 We recommend that a Green Lab team should have access to the digital infrastructure of an institution (and university) with a subpage on its main webpage. This way news, progress, and resources can be shared easily, and their work should be highlighted regularly on digital information screens.5
It is crucial to communicate internally and externally to build awareness and achieve action within the scientific community. Environmental sustainability is often thought of as expensive, and bold decisions on sustainable laboratory practices may be received as limiting researchers' freedom.6 Often trade-offs are mentioned between sustainability and factors such as safety, health, regulation, costs, and research. Group leaders and PIs taking part in sustainable laboratory actions should include these aspects in their performance reviews and funding applications to educate the community of their benefits.5
Give feedback to people that already implemented changes on how they contribute to the sustainability improvements of the laboratories. This will keep them engaged and prone to push for more changes.
Build a culture of informed and active colleagues, sharing knowledge. Reminding colleagues of certain sustainable actions such as turning off equipment can be facilitated through stickers or posters.30 Inclusion of senior staff ensures the creation of a cultural change on sustainability at all levels of an institution. We further recommend once per year a team building or community activity for the researchers involved in supporting sustainable laboratory actions.
One commonly mentioned advice is to turn-off equipment and computers, when they are not in use. Switching off all non-essential electrical equipment raises awareness of the amount of electricity wasted as a result of leaving equipment on unnecessarily. Just by mass-switching off equipment during the weekend, a reduced electricity consumption of 6% can be achieved, saving 16000 kW h equal to 7 tons of CO2e and 1861 €.92 Turning off equipment is a crucial aspect and by far one of the most important ones. It is also a great one to demonstrate a successful shift in mindset: rather than educating and telling researchers to turn off equipment, a successful paradigm shift is achieved when people think as equipment being switched-off as default. Only when people need certain equipment, they switch it on for the time it needs to be operated.
It is crucial to educate scientists, but especially students about the environmental impact of laboratories and science. As environmental awareness usually is already engrained in younger generations through media and society, they are more open and often demanding better practices when it comes to conducting research. Teaching students directly green lab practices, while teaching them standard laboratory techniques provides them with a great toolkit for their and our future. Ultimately a paradigm shift is achieved as soon as those students proceed on their academic path through Bachelors, Masters and PhD programs, finally also in future jobs in industry. This way, initial reluctance towards changes from senior staff will fade away as younger researchers enter the laboratory environment directly applying the new standard of sustainable laboratory practices.
Members and scientists of the Green Lab team will acquire transferable skills on effective communication with a variety of stakeholders. They will also develop skills on presentation, engagement and ultimately managing, all while being able to handle research projects as their main-role. These scientists are effectively growing themselves to the leaders of the sustainable future, while creating it.
Examples of frameworks include Green Impact, the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable/leaf-laboratory-efficiency-assessment-framework)) or the My Green Lab (https://www.mygreenlab.org/green-lab-certification.html) certification. While MyGreenLab© focuses on enlisting individual laboratories (2076 participating labs in 2023) to implement sustainable changes, LEAF© operates on the institutional level (105 institutes in 16 countries with 2900 labs and 4300 users in November 2023).2,129–131
LEAF© is an online software platform including a framework, which outlines requirements and measures to achieve various levels of standard.2 Online calculators on emissions and savings, technical guides, as well as training to assist with implementing the framework (e.g., auditing) are included. Its costs are between 1280 and 3025 € excluding VAT per institution depending on its size, allowing for direct inclusion of all laboratories per organization.2 The framework provides actions for the categories: waste, people, purchasing, equipment, IT, sample and chemical management, research quality, teaching criteria, ventilation, and water (Fig. S1, ESI†). Laboratories are accredited bronze, silver, or gold depending on the performance, and the (re-)certification process runs on an annual basis.
The self-assessment through the My Green Lab (MGL) Certification is performed through an online survey covering the categories: community, recycling and waste reduction, resource management, purchasing, green chemistry and green biologics, water, plug load, fume hoods, cold storage, large equipment, infrastructure energy, field work, animal research, and travel (Fig. S3, ESI†).2
Depending on an online self-assessment survey, MGL provides recommendations to further improve laboratory sustainability. Here 50% of lab members must complete the survey and assessment.2 After actions have been implemented, the lab personnel re-take the assessment survey to quantify their progress through a calculated score and certification level. Certification levels are bronze, silver, gold, platinum and green and are achieved in accordance with the score calculated by MGL (Fig. S2, ESI†). Recertification is required after two years. The expenses are between 319 and 456 € per academic lab and 2554–3649 € per commercial lab.
If more focus on healthcare and medicine is necessary, then the GreenED (https://greened.rcem.ac.uk/) Framework for Environmentally and Sustainable Emergency Medicine and Health Care is recommended. Other frameworks for building sustainability and a green building rating system are LEED (https://www.usgbc.org/leed) (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and the Labs2Zero Energy Score (https://www.i2sl.org/lab-energy-score). These tools give recommendations on several categories such as ventilation, equipment, procurement, waste, chemicals, or research quality and offer carbon and cost calculators.
The accreditation scheme of choice should be first evaluated and piloted within a smaller group of laboratories, to be able to share results relevant to the organization, company, or university. After successful completion, the framework should be rolled out to all institutes and laboratories in the organization with the previously gathered top-down support from operational decision makers.
The following recommendations (Table 3) can essentially be implemented immediately and do not comprise or interfere with the research conducted and are proven to be safe.
Research and education7 |
---|
- Enhance reproducibility by conducting research at the highest quality possible, saving resources and time. |
- Provide detailed information on reaction conditions, procedures, and data to enhance reproducibility. |
- Record and share negative results to avoid unnecessary reproduction attempts. |
- Educate students and new lab members on sustainable laboratory and research practices. |
Travel and conferencing |
---|
- Avoid air travel as much as possible and prioritize travel by train. |
- Prioritize local conferences accessible by train. |
- Attend meetings and conferences online rather than in person. |
- Attend only the most important conferences overseas via air travel. |
- Use resources on journey planning, which is discouraging of airplanes. |
- Unavoidable flights should be offset with verified carbon standard projects supporting jet fuel research. |
Energy efficiency |
---|
- Prioritize variable air volume (VAV) fume hoods over constant volume (CV) air supply systems.4 |
- Closing the sashes of fume hoods reduces its energy consumption between 40 and 67%, in addition to being safer.1,134 Equipping fume hoods with sensors that trigger automatic sash closing facilitates this action. |
- Increase the temperature of a ULT freezer from −80 °C to −70 °C to reduce energy consumption by 30–40% as sample stability and recovery are not affected.31,32,137 |
- Maintain an inventory list, share freezer space, and organize regular freezer cleanings to remove unneeded samples, frost buildup and dust accumulation.31,32 Join https://www.freezerchallenge.org. |
- Turn off equipment, when not in use. Devices should be turned-off by default and only be switched on, when needed. Here multiplugs, timers and switches can facilitate a behavioural change, while stickers can serve as reminders. |
- Utilize and run equipment such as autoclaves, ovens, and dishwashers only when full. |
- Replace overhead lights with LED bulbs.4 |
Data centres and computations |
---|
- Prioritize digital, paperless options such as digital laboratory journals and online clouds and minimize printing. |
- Run calculations at times and locations with the highest amount of green energy.129 |
- If privacy allows, prioritize data centres in locations with greater sustainable source of electricity to minimize carbon footprint.129 |
- Evaluate the set point temperature in server rooms to reduce active cooling. |
- Calculate the carbon footprint of the research and include those in cost-benefit analyses.184 |
- Improve the efficiency of code, prioritize C++, and optimize hardware.23,24 |
Water |
---|
- Retrofit/update autoclaves with systems that recirculate or reduce water consumption, which can save about 32000 L of water per week.8 |
- Implement aerators on taps. |
- Utilization of waterless condensers. |
- Cooling devices and systems should only operate in closed loops and rely on recirculated water. |
Chemicals |
---|
- Avoid the generation of surplus quantities. |
- Implement an online chemical search and location system (so called inventory) and regularly maintain its content. Make sure that chemicals are findable and accessible. |
- Share chemicals with other labs/group-members and consult the chemical search system if the compound needed is already available before ordering a new one. |
- Conduct reactions in the smallest volumes possible (i.e., rightsizing experiments) and check for their success before upscaling. |
- Minimize the number of physical experiments via computational modelling and simulations, where applicable.1 |
- Utilize efficient robotic, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for high-throughput experiment optimization (‘lab of the future’).215–219 |
- Purchase the smallest possible quantities of chemicals sufficient for a given experiment. |
- Prioritize benign and less hazardous reagents and solvents.143–145 |
- Recycle solvents and chemicals for cleaning. |
(Single-use) consumables |
---|
- Reduce, reuse, recycle.20,123 |
- Replace single-use plastics with glassware.19,52 |
- Reuse plastic where possible.19,20,123,220 Results are not affected through reusing glass or plastic as no carryovers or contamination is observed.52 |
- Reduce shipments and packaging. |
- Consult suppliers and producers if there is a take back scheme for used consumables. |
- Try to implement a recycling scheme for plastic consumables such as gloves, pipette tips or plastic tubes if contamination can be excluded. |
Glass waste |
---|
- If feasible, glassware should undergo repairs; if repair is not possible only then opt for disposal. |
Logistics and procurement |
---|
- Reduce the number of shipments and packaging by coordinating orders from across the institute/group. |
- Coordinate orders of commonly used items via ‘central stores’ within the institute, which store items in bulk and supply demands on site. |
- Prioritize local and responsible suppliers with a detailed sustainability plan. |
- Ask manufacturers and suppliers about life cycle assessments, take-back schemes, and more sustainable alternatives to standard products. |
Resource efficiency |
---|
- Whenever feasible, laboratory equipment should undergo repairs; if repair is not viable, disposal and replacing with new equipment should be considered as the last option. |
- Reuse equipment, computers, and furniture internally at locations/groups/projects that are in need of specialized equipment. This way group resources are preserved as well as less waste is being produced. Equipment that is not needed anymore but still intact should be donated or sold via second-hand refurbishing schemes. |
- Implement SOPs and report every detail of experiments, this way replication and reproducibility is enhanced, and less waste is generated. |
Working environment, commuting and finance |
---|
- Develop a sustainable travel policy prioritizing low-carbon forms of travel.3 |
- Prioritize public transport or biking whenever possible. |
- Provide a network of cycle paths, bike sheds, and other related facilities. |
- Offer a free train, metro and bus pass for staff and students. |
- Provide charging possibilities for electric vehicles. |
- Provide technical equipment for home–office and virtual meetings.3 |
- Equip buildings with solar panels to provide self-generated renewable energy. |
- Switch to a sustainable electricity provider (solar, wind).3 |
- Improve the retirement plans of staff, by switching to a sustainable solution and an ethical pension provider.221 |
- Move the bank and institution accounts to a financial institute committed to sustainable goals |
- Utilize waterless urinals to significantly reduce water usage.104 |
- Prioritize plant-based (vegetarian and vegan) menu options over meat-based diet and avoid food waste.3 |
- Support actions on nature and biodiversity on the campus. |
- Prioritize https://www.ecosia.org/ as the search engine for internet searches. |
Nevertheless, it should be recognized that each research organization is unique and that it may be required to develop an own (adapted) approach to implement environmental actions.104
Generally, manufacturers that make an effort to reduce packaging waste and offer take-back schemes should be prioritized in tenders seeking minimal packaging.50
When it comes to reusing single-use plastics or glassware there is a common misconception regarding the costs for washing, often argued through the production, footprint and costs of certain solvents used as well as the time and salary of the person cleaning the disposables or operating the dishwasher. These arguments have been disproven through LCAs and cost analyses.20 In fact, re-use strategies not only reduce the carbon footprint up to 11-fold but benefit the finances of a laboratory, even when wages for support staff for washing are included. These aspects are further accelerated through a central wash facility, scaling up the number of items being re-used.20
For concerns about contamination and loss of precision several examples on reusing plastics in microbiology laboratories exist, where results are not affected thus no carryovers or contamination are observed.52,107,132 In such cases savings of 516 kg of plastic waste per laboratory (7 researchers) per year were achieved, avoiding autoclaving and incineration.
Circular supply chains for plastic products can reduce emissions by over 80%.133 Usually, clinical incineration of single-use consumables is causing half of the emissions of protective wear and plastics.133 Thus opting for circular recycling reduces lifetime emissions by up to 74%, but is currently only feasible through fully circular glove companies such as Gloovy Eco Gloves© (https://gloovyecogloves.nl/en).133 In such cases reduction in use and exploring glass alternatives are crucial.134 Often suppliers and producers offer take-back schemes for used consumables, which should be prioritized.135
Chemicals and equipment should be shared among laboratories and staff. An online chemical search and location system (so-called inventory) facilitates these actions. Crucially, real-time information and automatic updates on the status and locations of chemicals need to be maintained to reduce time spent searching for chemicals and enhance productivity.136
During the holiday season it is strongly recommended to develop an action plan to switch off all devices and equipment as well as lowering the heating, or other measures for optimal lab use.92 These measurements should be combined with an annual laboratory cleaning (e.g., cleaning and organizing fridges and freezers).56
Inefficient laboratory equipment should be replaced with devices having better performance. Laboratory users should aim for equipment with the best performance:137
- ULT freezers with electricity usage of ≤13.5 watts per litre per day.
- Refrigerators and freezers of 2.5 watts per litre per day or 1.5 kW h per day.
Utilization of computational infrastructure can be optimized by switching calculations from an average data centre to a more efficient one to reduce the carbon footprint by 34%.42 The location of a data centre affects the carbon impact of calculations depending on the source of energy.138 Thus we recommend to provide access to low-carbon computing facilities and dynamically shift jobs from data centres across multiple locations with green energy mixes (e.g. solar, wind).100 Generally an inventory of maintained hardware should be made, and energy consumption measured during computer simulations and idle times. An overview of high-performance computing (HPC) facilities, their power usage effectiveness (PUE) and energy source is necessary to assess feasibility to move computations to different computing facilities based on energy source and energy usage. Evaluate the set point temperature in server rooms to reduce active cooling.23 Scientists should consider ‘digital temperance’: careful evaluation about the collection of specific data for research projects rather than collecting as much as possible and give a thorough thought to the storage and analysis of these data.41,139
It should further be noted that this list (Table 3) does not go in as much detail as our previously published guidebook.100 For more details and information we recommend consulting all aspects of our guidebook.
As fossil fuel depletion is of great concern, there exists extensive literature on green and sustainable chemistry, establishing biobased feedstocks and building blocks.141,142 Here the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry cover all aspects of experiments and reactions.143 These can be expanded by the 12 Principles of Circular Chemistry.109,144 With a background in chemistry, the following aspects are worth highlighting:
- Focus on the use of sustainable solvents (these can often be easily substituted without affecting the reaction outcome).145–148
- Consider the optimization of your purification process: an extraction, distillation, or recrystallization process can be faster, less expensive, and less solvent consuming than column chromatography.149
- Consider the optimization of the synthesis by applying the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry.150–152 Try to find more benign, e.g., biobased, building blocks and synthesize the desired compound in a catalytic reaction in a sustainable solvent.113,115,153 Prevent waste by designing and executing the experiments with high technical standards.154
- Achieving full atom economy (e.g., click chemistry)155 presents the most efficient reaction with practically no waste.156,157 Here sustainable feedstocks such as biomass, plastic waste and CO2 should be valorised.158–160 The value of a procedure is enhanced the more circularity is applied.114,144,161,162
Crucially, these aspects should also find their way into the curriculum of Bachelors, Masters and High School programs.155 There are several examples to improve chemistry education and to stimulate a systematic thinking approach into the minds of early researchers and students.164–169 We cannot expect future scientists to create sustainable products if they are not taught how to think sustainable.170–172 Students need to be familiar with concepts such as LCAs, green, circular and sustainable chemistry early on.173–176 Transforming chemistry education, which prepares the next generation of chemists to enhance the safety, effectiveness and most importantly reduce environmental impact is a key goal of Beyond Benign© (https://www.beyondbenign.org/). As of March 2024 there were 150 Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC) (https://www.beyondbenign.org/he-green-chemistry-commitment/) signers, which aims to expand the community and education of chemists through a flexible framework for green chemistry curriculum and training.177 It further provides access to funding opportunities and a benchmark to track progress on learning and research objectives. As all science should strive to become more sustainable and with our background in wet labs and chemistry, we acknowledge a new standard: the field of Green Chemistry should become just chemistry.178
Although many guidelines, frameworks and networks already exist, they are mostly located in high-income countries and cover not all areas of scientific research. For example, no similar frameworks for computational research or qualitative research exist to date.2 Also knowledge gaps exist in understanding the sustainability of health research and carbon emissions in the health research system, which just recently are tackled through a Green Surgery Report (https://ukhealthalliance.org/sustainable-healthcare/green-surgery-report/).180 Networks are further missing in low- or middle-income settings. A coordinated approach is necessary to alleviate the burden on individual researchers. Universities, journals, and funders need to work together to advance environmentally sustainable research across all sectors.2
Changing the research and consumption behaviour of staff, without local and bottom-up engagement is a challenging aspect.5 Thus, grassroots groups in sustainable laboratories are essential for each university and industry meeting their own goals, being eligible for funding and delivering on emission reductions. Thus, by including full-time senior staff into a grassroots initiative it will be easier to exert influence across hierarchy, achieving recognition and top-down support.
Suppliers are starting to meet the growing demand for sustainable products such as providing alternatives for single-use plastic, implementing take-back schemes, and developing greener chemicals and solvents.123 Currently at Merck© and Sigma-Aldrich© a pilot program110 on plastic recycling and take-back schemes is assessed to develop circular recycling solutions, reduce the amount of plastic in the value chain and offer cost-effective re-processing of plastic waste into products and packaging within their supply chain.110 Also packaging and deliveries are being improved where examples include companies such as MilliporeSigma© recently switching from expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam to cardboard alternatives, saving 23 tons of EPS annually.182
In November 2023 My Green Lab© started together with four major pharma companies, AstraZeneca© (https://www.astrazeneca.com/sustainability.html), GSK©, Amgen©, and Bristol Myers Squib© the Converge183 initiative. Harnessing the collective power of the pharmaceutical industry they collectively request that suppliers with significant laboratory operations to certify their laboratories through sustainable laboratory frameworks by 2030, while also providing sustainable products.
Demand is a crucial driving force, herein; the more researchers request suppliers to assess and declare the carbon footprint of their products, the more likely suppliers will provide and act on these data with improved products.10 This momentum hopefully keeps on growing as more and more scientists are educating others and future generations of students. Improving environmental awareness, responsibility and training in the laboratories will lead to a prospering lab-supply industry.123
The sustainability of dry labs and computational research is also coordinated through a network and provides numerous calculators to measure the carbon footprint of various types of computations, models and algorithms.23,100,184 One example is the Green Algorithms (https://www.green-algorithms.org/) calculator: an open-access tool to estimate the environmental impact of algorithms used without affecting the existing code and covering a wide range of hardware configurations.2,38 Since its introduction in 2020, the calculator has been utilized by about 15000 users across over 20000 sessions, averaging to approximately 200 users per week globally.2
Medical and clinical research has fewer well-established resources, but recent initiatives are busy developing or improving measurement protocols, standards, and tools.185–188 In November 2023 with the Green Surgery Report (https://ukhealthalliance.org/sustainable-healthcare/green-surgery-report/) the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change published an impressive first guide aiming to reduce the environmental impact of surgical care while maintaining high quality patient care.180 The data and guidance presented are based on evidence, case studies, cover barriers and the key contributors of emissions in healthcare (single-use items, energy consumption, anaesthetic gases).104,180 Additionally, there are innovative cleaning technologies (https://envetec.com/generations/) emerging (e.g., Envetec© (https://envetec.com/)) for the treatment of medical waste: Northwell Health© (https://www.northwell.edu/), as New York's premier healthcare provider, is adopting such techniques to sustainably treat over 226796 kg of regulated medical waste annually onsite, with projected decrease of waste-related Scope 3 emissions by 90%.189–192
Also, aspects of sharing negative results are being improved not only within research groups and internal presentations, but also through dedicated journals. The Journal of Trial and Error (https://journal.trialanderror.org/) aims to close the gap between what is researched and what is published. Ultimately these frameworks allow the reduction of reproducibility issues, waste production and time loss through repeating experiments.117
As for publishers, examples exist such as the journal Research in Engineering Design, which developed a Research Environmental Impact Disclosure statement as a requirement to provide an environmental impact statement for the submission of journal articles or grant applications.1
This progress clearly marks a shift in the funding landscape for academia and industry, where mandatory standards for resource-efficient science are set. Political pressure (top-down) as well as institutions and researchers/reviewers (bottom-up) need to advance these developments further through requests, committee-work, and target setting to update funding requirements/conditions.10 Ultimately, it is advised that Green Lab certifications such as LEAF or My Green Lab become requirements on par with ethical, health, and safety reviews in grant applications.
Scientific societies, researchers and funders should work together to improve the format and organization of conferences:205,206
- Frequency.
- Size.
- Location with local hubs.
- All talks live streamed and recorded.
- Electronic posters.
- Electronic-only program books.
- Carbon neutrality via virtual conferencing.
- Reduce energy and resource use.
- Sustainable catering (e.g., plant-based).
- Food waste management.
- Visa-free attendance.
Meetings should rather be organized around local hubs (e.g., America, Europe, Asia) running in a parallel and synchronous fashion, where attendees travel as much as possible via train or other ground-based transportation, still allowing for in-person networking opportunities and social interactions. Such a multi-location in-person model should focus on hubs being located in central rather than remote cities of each continent, to which keynote speakers are invited locally. Regional society meetings provide benefits such as low hosting costs as they allow for more economic public venues.205 Analysing attendance patterns indicate Chicago, Tokyo and Paris as suitable host cities, which could reduce the combined travel emissions of conferences by 80%.80 As the conference is taking place at all locations at the same time, people should have access to online-presentation rooms to be able to follow talks taking place live at a different hub. Livestreaming and recordings made available online will benefit other researchers globally, promote inclusivity, and increase the scope of audiences reached.205 This multi-location in-person model, where participants only travel to nearby locations to interact with other ‘local’ scientists benefit the scientists as personal productivity is enhanced as time will not be lost by driving to an airport or waiting to board a plane.
Other aspects include the elimination of merchandise, utilizing compostable conference name badges, reducing plastic waste usage (e.g., disposable cutlery) to a minimum, eliminating food waste, or encouraging attendees to bring their own reusable materials such as cups or making notes electronically on portable devices.205 International meetings are frequently planned 5–10 years ahead through booking of convention centres, a reason more to start thinking about more sustainable alternatives rather sooner than later.16
Grant review panels organized by funding organisations and other similar activities, that do not require face-to-face meetings, should prioritize remote video-conferencing. Generally the scientific community should make online communication, conferencing and video-calls the standard.3,73,207 Online portals allow for attending more meetings in a time efficient manner, increasing the outreach.208 If adopted on a global scale, reductions in long distance travel by the scientific community would drastically reduce carbon emissions.16,209 Actions of scientists adhering to this new status quo should be valued and should influence policies in a way that subsidies/funding for air travel prices are stopped and shifted to e.g., train travel enhancing efficiency.
Researchers should further share their experience and knowledge on sustainability programmes, not only within their own institution but also through creating resources and publications to further enable the scientific community for a systemic change with additional evidence and data.
The prevailing approach to comprehensive building sustainability is currently the LEED program (https://www.usgbc.org/leed) (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED© serves as a framework for rating and certifying buildings and their systems, offering guidance in areas such as energy and water conservation, use of healthy and sustainable construction materials, indoor air quality, and other aspects during construction and renovation.30
Energy decisions should be based on the full life cycle of devices and equipment, making variable air volume (VAV) fume hoods the standard over constant volume (CV) air-supply systems for energy-efficient operation.4 Office and noncritical support spaces should be segregated from laboratory space to enhance airflow. Generally, it is wise to segregate spaces and, when feasible, cascade air from one room to the other (e.g., air conditioning or heat pump in between cooled/heated spaces).4 It is wise to include controls, timers and occupancy sensors in devices with diverse loads such as lights, computers and fume hoods.4
The baseload energy consumption of science buildings vs. the usage by the users, i.e., running the building (heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, etc.) vs. the activities in the building (science activities, instrument use, computers etc.), often averages at 75–80% to keep buildings operational and thus 20–25% of energy consumption is associated with users (Table S12,† ESI). We recommend acquiring such knowledge for individual institutions to enhance directing of funds and efforts to maximize the sustainability impact.
Finally, in industry as well as in academia it should be considered to investigate on-site power generation through renewable energy (photovoltaic (PV) for footpath, parking-area and roofing materials) as it has a positive economic impact. Furthermore, heat pumps can drastically reduce the costs for domestic heating replacing gas usage.4 Depending on the location, green power through electricity providers utilizing hydropower, wind farms or PV systems should be examined. Laboratory efficiency can be enhanced through sharing laboratory- and facility spaces, where a previous study demonstrated space savings of up to 30%.120 These aspects complement the sharing of chemicals and laboratory equipment, fostering a collaborative research space.120
Educating and implementing the new standards of sustainable laboratory practices starting from laboratory practicals and PhD programs will ultimately carry over to corporate research, as soon as these young researchers move on their career path and apply their green standards in their new working environment. As universities are interlinked and collaborating with industry, those practices will become recognized there as well.
As science has the obligation to be a leading sector in this transformation, it is crucial to be honest about challenges and mistakes made, educating stakeholders, other scientists, policy makers, and society worldwide about concrete ways to improve sustainability and operations.6 As institutions all over the world face similar challenges in reaching carbon neutrality, implementing high impact measures, connecting as a network, and providing guidance to each other is crucial, to enhance progress and avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’.6 Scientists, companies, organizations, universities, institutions, suppliers and funding agencies need to work together collectively and share insights to effectively reduce their carbon footprint.6 If we are successful, significant benefits are achieved: if only half of all American laboratories would reduce their energy use by 30%, their total annual energy consumption could be reduced equivalent to 840000 households, €1.14 billion and 19 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.4 Such a systemic change would correspond to removing 1.3 million cars from highways or preventing harvesting 56 million trees.4
Furthermore, bottom-up engagement and grassroots initiatives are essential for a sustainable transformation process as behavioural change by individuals is directly affecting Scope 3 emissions.6
Ultimately, while there are already great tools, frameworks, and networks available on the importance of sustainable science and laboratory practices, those actions alone will not be sufficient. It is necessary that those efforts are amplified through larger bodies:
1. Funding organizations need to make it a requirement that scientific research has to be conducted by adhering to sustainable laboratory standards and practices acknowledging environmental responsibility.
There should be policies in place mandating sustainable practices and setting targets.1,211 Applicants must discuss the climate impact of their project in their application and should be allowed to choose the least carbon-intensive instead of the economically cheapest way to travel.3 Committee work should be virtualized in online meetings whenever possible.
2. Suppliers and manufacturers need to provide sustainable product alternatives with similar or better properties than usual standards. These alternatives need to be cost competitive and broadly advertised to support a shift in the scientific community. Full life cycle assessments of products should be made available to guide costumers to sustainable products. Consumers have a responsibility in requesting them frequently. Single-use consumables need to be evaluated to reduce plastic waste production, where mono-streams facilitate recycling. Deliveries and logistics should be moving away from on-demand to weekly or biweekly, thereby reducing emissions from delivery and packaging. Packaging itself should not rely on plastics. Take-back recycling schemes for solvent bottles, gloves and other plastics need to be established to achieve circularity.
3. Conference organizers should move away from annual meetings and reduce the meeting frequency to biannually or less. Here options for virtual attendance need to be provided and a multi-location in-person model has been strongly recommended to minimize the environmental effects of travel.73 Splitting the conference from one major location to at least three accessible hubs, will reduce travel impacts while also promoting equity and inclusivity.
4. Publishers and journals should recognize their responsibility in advocating for sustainable science and laboratory practices. While publishing a growing number of articles addressing the environmental impact of research, they also have a responsibility to raise awareness on sustainable strategies, actions, and policies.
5. Universities, scientists, and individual researchers need to educate one another on sustainable knowledge, skills, and experimental design. These include green chemistry, life cycle assessments, and sustainable laboratory operation and practices. Environmental impact and its reduction need to be included in internal and external evaluations of laboratories, departments, and organizations.1 Sustainability is as important as health and safety and should be incentivised in policies.124
In the past, the academic system has experienced numerous changes, often prompted by society.3 In the face of the climate challenge, the academic system has the potential to undergo again a transformative shift, this time towards sustainability.212 Our generation of scientists and researchers has the opportunity and obligation to limit the most extreme outcomes of the climate crisis.127,213 In contrast to many other societal sectors, the academic system benefits from independent academics being the key decision makers in shaping framework conditions for the future and most importantly educating our new generation. Hence, the academic system is strategically well positioned to engage in a self-directed transformation to climate sustainability.3,214 We urge and encourage our colleagues worldwide, irrespective of their roles or levels in the scientific community to participate in these collective endeavours to create a sustainable future!
The University of Groningen's Faculty of Science and Engineering emits 68 tons of CO2e per publication, equalling to annual emmisions of about 9 tons per person and 0.19 tons per m2. The joined laboratories of the University of Groningen produce 109 tons of hazardous chemical waste and 17 tons of plastic waste annually. Typically, a chemistry laboratory (45 active laboratory researchers) can produce up to 7 tons of hazardous chemical waste annually, corresponding to 157 kg per person per year. Similarly, a biology laboratory (17 active lab members) produces about 533 kg of plastic waste equalling 32.4 kg per person per year. By applying sustainable laboratory practices the Green Labs RUG team achieved a reduced carbon impact equalling annual savings of 398763 € as well as 477.1 tons of CO2e, which corresponds to savings of 10372 kg of CO2e and 8669 € per lab per year. Efficient equipment management in a two-week winter break led to additional 247646 € of savings in 2022–2023. The majority of students and university employees demand climate action in academia and science, and our data are further demonstrating a business case for investing in sustainability.6
Driving lasting change will require ambitious leaders and sustainability experts, opening opportunities for new job roles, professional development, and further innovation.1 Scientists should not be part of the problem, but part of the solution! If we, as scientists and researchers, believe what we are publishing, should we not be the first ones to act? How can one expect industry, politics, and society to change, if we as scientists are not changing anything either? Scientists should lead and educate by example, improve their practices using the scientific method, and be the change they want to see!
Footnote |
† Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/d4su00056k |
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2024 |