A Case Study on the Role of Academic Leaders in the Sustainability of Research Labs: The Case for a Biomedical Bioinformatics Certification
The US National Institute of Health needs to follow suit in the drive for sustainable science because he supports Wellcome’s move to require certification. He says that the NIH is the main influence on medical research in the United States. We need the institution to have leadership in order to drive change.
Davida Smyth, a microbiologist at Texas A&M University in San Antonio who co-authored a paper on the challenges of making research labs more sustainable, says that these types of programme have value beyond the certification. It’s a sign that you’re getting good feedback from your colleagues, students, and the institution. This must be a group effort.
I think that academic leaders in particular — with their decision-making power and role-model function — have a moral obligation to act. The study shows that when leaders in an organization show responsible and eco-conscious behavior, they are encouraged to do so as well.
Environmentally Responsible Scientists: Creating an Ice Champ at Princess Mxima Center in the Netherlands during the Cold Storage Management Era of Green Health Initiatives
In response to the increasing number offreezer challenges organized all around the world, I helped to organize one with my local green team at Princess Mxima Center. We invited groups to compete in cold-storage management challenges such as tossing old samples, making sample inventories and designing sample exit strategies for departing lab members to win the ice champ title. Efforts to increase awareness, improve lab infrastructure and save energy from shutting down freezers and turning up the temperature resulted in improvements.
I began to experience feelings of empowerment and hope after I became aware of other people’s values like climate justice, care and collective action.
We set up our foundation during the early stage of what feels like a wave of grass-roots initiatives in science and health care. Over the last 3 years more than 100 green initiatives for health transition have emerged in the Netherlands under the Dutch Green Health Alliance. The wave comes at a time when eco-anxiety, the fear of an environmental cataclysm, is at a high — several surveys have highlighted the distress that negative environmental news is causing1.
Many scientists could reduce their environmental impact by rethinking their approach to planning and executing experiments, Durgan says. They could save money and time by cutting down on redundant tests or experiments, a move that would affect both money and resources. It is a good idea to be as critical as possible about what experiment you choose to do, and how to do it at the front end.
Before scientists make any changes to their protocols, they should be confident that their results won’t be affected. “If your research requires you to use 20 litres of solvent or 20 pipette tips, you should absolutely do that,” Freese says. “You should not feel bad about conducting more experiments if it means your results become more significant and reproducible.”
Scientists at the Carbon Neutral laboratory are encouraged to reduce their use of toxic chemicals, which have been part of standard protocols. Licence says that if he has to use dichloromethane, he’ll challenge himself to look for an alternative.
He says the Carbon Neutral Laboratory has found efficiencies through collaboration. “We share a lot of things like fume hoods and spectrometers,” says Licence. Sharing helps save space and energy, but requires more planning and patience. “The entire building is 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.”
It will take a while for the lab 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’m fairly confident that we will achieve carbon neutrality by the 25-year time frame. But where we sit right now, I would say that we’re probably three, four or five years behind that payback schedule.”
Research laboratories at a typical university account for at least 60 percent of the energy and water use, according to an eye- opening report. And, depending on their field of study, researchers have a work-related carbon footprint that is 7–25 times greater than the per-person climate-maintenance guideline set out in the Paris agreement.
Some steps can be as simple as pushing a few buttons. Durgan explains that the Babraham’s labs turned the temperature of their 40 ultra-cold freezers up, from −80 °C to −70 °C . Some researchers warned that, if the freezers ever malfunctioned, the samples would spoil faster without that extra 10 °C cushion. Scientists at the University of Cambridge, UK, had made the adjustment without any problems, and Durgan spoke to Martin Howes who reported that. She was also reassured by the roster of researchers who reported their own experiences with −70 °C freezers to My Green Lab (see go.nature.com/3xtbeen). The move reduced energy consumption at the Babraham without affecting the frozen samples.
The fume hoods are a prime target of energy-servation efforts. As outlined in the RSC Sustainability report, a typical fume hood uses 3.5 times more energy than an average household does each year1. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has estimated that it costs more than US$4,500 to run a fume hood per year, a significant dent to a lab’s budget. If you close the sliding window at the front of the hood when you don’t have an experiment, you can cut the air flow rate in the hood by two-thirds. The Harvard Initiative to close fume hoods resulted in a $200,000 reduction on energy costs.
Durgan warns that other steps aren’t always so obvious or clear-cut. “You might think about trading some plastic items for reusable glassware,” she says. It will require energy to sterilfy the glass, and it will use water.
How can funding agencies help save science? Environmental impact scores on research supplies in NIH laboratories: A case study from my Green Lab in Groningen, Ireland
Durgan adds that any cutbacks in the name of sustainability could lead to more waste if the research results aren’t reliable. She says that the more effort we make to be sure that our data is reliable, the more time and resources will be used by the international community trying to follow up those findings.
Unfortunately, Connelly says, scientists can’t simply consult manufacturers’ labels to determine which products deliver efficiency without compromising research results. Firms are able to attach claims of being sustainable to products that are really wasteful. “Companies are using their own standards,” Connelly said. You need to be aware of which standards are credible and which ones are not without third-party verification.
My Green Lab created a database of independently generated environmental-impact scores for more than 1,200 lab supplies in order to improve clarity. 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.
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.”
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”.
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.
More impressive results have been reported by individual labs. 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).