Going Green in the Lab
From the desk of Lauren...
Since joining the Schiffman Lab at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, I have been increasingly interested in reducing the waste in the lab. Timed perfectly with the Climate Change Conference currently taking place in Paris, TheScientist hosted a webinar yesterday about going green in the lab. It was a great opportunity to hear about the green initiatives Genentech, Harvard, and My Green Lab have implemented which I will try to highlight here so we can all bring them to our own labs!
Recycling Bins: the obvious starting point in office spaces, but in labs it’s hard to get contractors to take recycling due to safety concerns. Harvard’s solution? Show companies a good history of separating out biohazard waste and carefully rinse or remove all labels to avoid handling concerns. Make it harder for things to accidentally make it into recycling by not placing them by fume hoods or where hazardous materials are generally used.
Freezer temperature: it has become standard to use -80C for no other reason other than we could make a freezer to go this low. All the experts agree that real damage doesn’t start happening until around -60C, so they recommend setting freezers to -70C. Making this change reduced ~25% freezer energy costs at Genentech.
Reuse rooms and events: avoid ordering superfluous materials and solutions, but having a room and garage sale type days for extra equipment hanging around the lab is a great way to repurpose things your lab won’t need. Also is great for reusing unrecyclable things like styrofoam shipping materials.
Biosafety cabinets: minimize the time the sash is open by closing the sash between experiments. This saves Harvard over $200,000/yr in HVAC costs and reduced each lab’s energy intensity by an average of 608 CFM/day.
Additionally, minimizing the time the UV light is turned on saves energy. Cleaning these bulbs regularly is essential for them to have any effect whatsoever, and even then the maximum effect is within 15 minutes (ASU). Thus we should limit use of the UV light to the 15 minutes immediately preceding and following hood use. The CDC has actually released that the use of UV light in biosafety cabinets is not recommended or necessary. Just using 70% ethanol to disinfect the hood is sufficient for sterility. There’s some great literature about this one, including from the NIH, but for the best analysis I’d check out this article. “Use of a UV light in excess of an hour or overnight is massive overkill.”
PCR and centrifuges: the last idea I’d like to implement in our lab addresses the costly maintenance of cool temperatures in PCR thermocyclers and centrifuges. Only run PCRs during the day so it doesn’t remain cooling throughout the night or just ask someone who is staying late to take it out when it finishes. Similarly, store just the rotor in a 4C fridge instead of having the whole centrifuge working all day and night to maintain that temperature.
Check out more about Harvard’s sustainability campaign at: http://green.harvard.edu/ and watch the free Go Green webinar here!














