The Carbon Neutral Laboratory: Towards a Zero-Energy Future at the International Research Council for Chemistry, and a Report from Freese
In its 2022 report, the Royal Society of Chemistry found that 79% of the researchers surveyed knew that their lab activities affected the environment, and 84% wanted to reduce the adverse environmental impact of their work. Another 63% said that they had made changes in the previous two years to reduce that impact, or that of their research groups or departments.
Before scientists make any changes to their protocols, they should be confident that their results won’t be affected. Freese tells them to use 20 litres of solvent or 20 pipette tips for their research. If your results become more significant and reproducible, you should be ok with conducting more experiments.
Scientists at the Carbon Neutral Laboratory are encouraged to reduce their use of highly toxic solvents, including chemicals that have been part of standard protocols for decades. “If a reaction that I want to do requires me to use dichloromethane, I will then challenge myself to look for an alternative,” Licence says.
Collaboration has been found for efficiency in the Carbon Neutral Laboratory. “We share a lot of things like fume hoods and spectrometers,” says Licence. Sharing takes planning and patience but helps to save space and energy. The entire building has been designed to make people think differently. Students and academics share ideas, work together and often translate knowledge in a much more rapid and much less siloed way than we would have in a traditional old-school chemistry department.”
The lab will take some time to live up to its name. The original aspiration was to reach net carbon neutrality within 25 years, enough time to allow energy savings to offset the energy required for its construction. “We are, at the moment, slightly behind target because there’s been some technical problems with some of the mechanical, electrical and combined heat and power units that are run on biomass,” Licence says. I think we will reach carbon neutrality by the 25-year time frame. I think we are three to four or five years behind the payback schedule right now.
In some sectors, this awareness is turning into action, says Thomas Freese, the lead author of the RSC Sustainability report1 and a PhD student in green chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Leading research universities are cutting their environmental impact, funders are raising their standards and individual scientists are changing their protocols to make their research more efficient, less wasteful and more sustainable. “It’s an intellectual grassroots movement,” Freese says.
Some steps can be as simple as pushing a few buttons. The temperature of their ultra-cold freezers were raised from 80 C to 70 C. If the freezers malfunctioned, the samples wouldn’t last as long without the extra 10 C cushion. To ease those concerns, Durgan spoke to Martin Howes, then the sustainable-labs coordinator at the University of Cambridge, UK, who reported that scientists there had made the adjustment without any issues. She was reassured by the research team who reported their experiences with 70 C freezers to My Green Lab. The move did not affect the frozen samples at the Babraham.
Fume hoods are also prime targets in energy-conservation efforts. A typical home uses 3.5 times more energy than a typical fume hood does each year. It costs more than US$4,500 per year for a Harvard University lab to run a fume hood and that is a huge hit to their budget. Simply closing the sliding window at the front of the hood when not working on an experiment can cut the airflow rate by two-thirds, with similar reductions in energy expenditure1. A Harvard initiative in 2015–16 to close fume hoods reduced energy costs by nearly $200,000 each year3.
Fretz says that although the team has tried using glass and stainless steel in place of plastics in active-air and surface-microcosm studies, each collection can have upwards of 500–1,000 samples, which means that substantial time and space is needed for cleaning and sterilizing. “We don’t have the staff, lab space or budget for projects to take on this additional workload, so plastic single-use consumables have become the de facto solution,” he says.
My Green Lab: Creating a Database of Sustainability-Sensitive Environmental Impact Scores for Scientific Instrumentation and Supply Chains
If the research results aren’t reliable, then any cutbacks in the name of sustainable would lead to more waste. The international research community will use less time and resources if we don’t make sure that our data is reliable and reproducible, she says.
As chief executive of My Green Lab, a non-profit organization in San Diego, California, James Connelly pays close attention to the marketing claims on scientific equipment and products: “Ultra efficient.” It was a low impact. “Renewable.”
In a bid to improve clarity, My Green Lab has created ACT (accountability, consistency, transparency), a database of independently generated environmental-impact scores for more than 1,200 lab supplies, from pipettes and solvents to freezers and mass spectrometers. The scores, presented on a branded ACT label, take into account the full life cycle of a product, including its manufacturing impact, use of energy and water, packaging and ultimate disposal.
Cost savings can be used as an incentive. Freese says that at the University of Groningen, the 46 labs that received LEAF certification saw total cost savings of more than $440,000 each year — an average of more than $9,500 per lab — by adopting energy-saving measures that required minimal investment.
Funding agencies are really the only entities that can bring large-scale change, Durgan says. “People who might not have been so motivated from an environmental perspective will now have a strategic reason to be more sustainable, because funding is going to depend on it.”
He believes that other agencies should follow in the footsteps of Wellcome in their drive for sustainable science. The National Institute of Health in the United States is the “most influential research agency in the world”, he says. We need that institution to have leadership that will help drive change.
In a statement to Nature, the NIH Office of Extramural Research said it doesn’t require lab certification, but does “consider the scientific environment during peer review and monitor compliance with all requirements post-award through our grants oversight procedures”.
A Sustainable Approach to Reduce Plastic Waste at the Marine Institute and the Bristol College of Health, Science and Society (RecycleLab): A research chemist’s perspective
Individual labs have reported even more impressive results. In 2022, Jane Kilcoyne, a research chemist at the Marine Institute in Galway, Ireland, achieved annual savings of $16,000 by, among other things, turning up the temperature of freezers, closing fume hoods when possible, and ordering and preparing solutions and reagents only as needed (see Nature https://doi.org/nhhm; 2022).
“At our Drug Control Centre, where strict protocols prevent cross-contamination in drug testing, we have also implemented a sustainable approach by reusing glass test tubes, plastic centrifuge tubes and plastic scintillation vials. By utilizing a dishwasher and standardized cleaning practices, we significantly reduce plastic waste while maintaining the high standards required for our research.”
The reagents for library preparation and DNA/RNA extraction are packaged in plastic in the lab after sample collection. “We could substitute some of the plastic with glassware; but it comes with challenges for lab safety as glass is more likely to break accidentally and create a hazardous spill.”
According to Dainton, the trial data showed that the programme worked and as a result, the UWE Bristol College of Health, Science & Society and RecycleLab have formed a partnership. “Through this partnership, we expect to recycle over 600 kg of plastic waste, which is approximately 10% of the plastic waste generated by the college each year.
The authors noted that adopting their practices would require considerable operational and behavioural changes, which often acts as a deterrent. For instance, a metal loop used to plate bacteria needs to be heated to ensure biological decontamination, which takes time, and the plastic containers used to store chemicals have to be transported to a specialist facility for cleaning.
But times are changing, says Broadbent. Through a project funded by King’s College, her team, along with an undergraduate student working on the project, is developing a business case for switching to glass containers. “While using glass vials was common in the past, implementing this change now requires careful consideration of costs, labour, safety and materials,” Broadbent says.
Carbon emissions are generated when the vial, flies and food are burned at high temperatures. The team needs to address the environmental impact growing fast.