The Carbon Neutral Laboratory: How does the Babraham Institute experiment to reach planetary neutrality without compromising the scope or quality of its results?
Durgan is one of a growing number of researchers who are trying to deliver the message that science can be more sustainable without compromising the scope or quality of the results. At the Babraham Institute, she chairs the steering committee for the Green Labs Initiative, a cross-disciplinary effort to reduce the planetary impact of research across the campus. The institute used a system that uses recirculated water to retrofit its heavily used autoclaves, saving more than 30,000 litres of water each week.
Scientists need to be confident that their results won’t be affected before they make any changes. “If your research requires you to use 20 litres of solvent or 20 pipette tips, you should absolutely do that,” Freese says. If your results become more significant and reproducible then you shouldn’t feel bad about it.
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. Licence says that if he needs to use dichloromethane, he will 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 takes more planning and patience, but helps to save space and energy. “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.”
Still, it will take some time 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. It is my expectation that we will reach 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.”
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, funding is increasing, and individual scientists are changing their protocol to make their research more efficient and sustainable. “It’s an intellectual grassroots movement,” Freese says.
Pushing a few buttons can be as simple as taking a couple of steps. Durgan explains that the Babraham’s labs turned the temperature of their 40 ultra-cold freezers up, from −80 °C to −70 °C . The researchers warned that if the freezers malfunction, the samples would lose their freshness at a faster rate. 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 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 by nearly 20% without affecting the frozen samples.
Fume hoods are often targets for energy-conservation 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. The airflow rate can be cut by two-thirds with the same reductions in energy expenditures if you close the sliding window at the front of the hood. The Harvard effort to close fume hoods reduced energy costs by $200,000 a year.
Broadbent says researchers often tell her that they want to change their plastic-consumption habits but don’t know how or lack the resources, or that “they have some colleagues who are not on board”. Funding mechanisms will help support a change in behaviors. Money could be spent to upgrade equipment for washing glassware and workshops to change mindsets and debunk myths, such as the one that using washable glassware carries a high risk of contamination.
Durgan adds that any cutbacks in the name of sustainability could lead to more waste if the research results aren’t reliable. “The more effort we make to be sure that our data is robust and reproducible, the less collective time and resources are going to be wasted by the international research community trying to chase or follow up those findings,” she says.
Unfortunately, Connelly says, scientists can’t simply consult manufacturers’ labels to determine which products deliver efficiency without compromising research results. In a practice known as greenwashing, firms can attach claims of sustainability to truly wasteful products. “Companies are using their own standards,” Connelly said. Without third-party verification you have to be aware of which standards are legit and which aren’t.
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.
My Green Lab also offers a road map to scientific sustainability through a certification programme that requires labs to meet certain standards and benchmarks on the use of energy, water and supplies. The fee to go through the process is currently $450 for academic labs and $4,000 for commercial labs. In 47 countries, around 1,200 labs have been certified. Not all will qualify for certification, but successful applicants are awarded a wall plaque. Certification lasts for two years; if a lab wants to remain certified after that, it has to go through the process again.
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.”
However, while he supports the move by Wellcome to require certification, he thinks other agencies should follow suit in the drive for sustainable science. He says that the National Institute of Health is the “elephant in the room” in the United States. We need that institution’s leadership to change the academic industry.
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”.
Practical methods for reducing the environmental impact of single-use plastic on laboratory operations: The case of the University of California, Berkeley and King’s College
More impressive results have been reported by individual labs. The chemist Jane Kilcoyne at the Marine Institute in Galway achieved an annual savings of $16,000 by ordering and preparing only what is needed, turning up the temperature of freezers, closing fume hoods when possible, and so on.
University operators worldwide are aware of their plastic addiction and want to reduce their reliance on single-use plastic. University College London in the UK has pledged to be free of single-use plastic by the end of the century, and Australian National University has the same goal. The University of California, Berkeley, has committed to meeting the same target by 2030.
“Back in the lab, after sample collection, most of the reagents for DNA/RNA extraction and library preparation are also packaged in plastic,” Fretz says. “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.”
The trial data showed the programme worked well, and UWE Bristol has formed a partnership with RecycleLab which is based in the UK. “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. Broadbent said that implementing a change to using glass requires careful consideration of costs, labour, safety and materials.
The disposal of these vials, along with flies and food, involves incineration at high temperatures, which generates substantial carbon emissions. The environmental impact is an urgent priority for the team.
