Innovative plans to cut science waste and boost sustainability

Lecturers in GCU’s Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences have launched a project to find new sustainable ways to cut science waste in their teaching and research labs.

The Department’s new sustainability champions Dr Gillian Hunter and Dr Yvonne Dempsie, both researchers in the Research Centre for Health (ReaCH), are working with the University’s Sustainability Officer Paulo Cruz to make their labs more environmentally friendly.

They were among six projects from School of Health and Life Sciences who were successful in winning up to £5,000 to pilot new ideas, developments and projects that bring to life the University’s Strategy for Learning 2030 (SfL, 2030) and its transformative education vision.

It is estimated that 1.8% of the world’s plastic waste originates from science labs and a single researcher in a tissue culture lab can easily use over 200kg of single-use plastics a year.

That’s why the team made a bid for funding for their new project entitled ‘Developing sustainable laboratory practices in the department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences’.

The £4,617 funding will help to align their teaching and research labs with the UCL LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework) system, which provides calculators that enable monitoring of sustainability within labs and identify areas for improvement.

Dr Hunter, SfL Innovation Project lead and Fellow of HEA, said: “LEAF is a sustainability initiative run by University College London where they have developed online calculators to estimate sustainability of labs and then track improvements following implementation of certain changes.

“Yvonne and myself have worked in science for a long time and we know how much is thrown away. There is a lot of waste, especially considering at home you try to recycle all your plastics, but in the labs, we dispose of the majority of it.

“We are now in the process of signing up to the LEAF framework and once we have access to their calculators we aim to assess our labs.

“The calculators look at recycling, water usage, electricity, where you buy things from in terms of the carbon footprint and sustainability. The framework suggests where you can make changes saving water, electricity, and reusing certain things.

“Our plan is to start small and make changes in one or two labs over the next six months. Eventually all our labs will be more sustainable. We want to tie this into our Honours projects so that our fourth-year students can take over the management of this and use the calculators to make continuous improvements moving forward.

“The SfL grant will pay for a part-time member of staff over the summer to start using the calculators and identify easy fixes where we might hope to see immediate impact. Then we aim to produce material to disseminate amongst all labs in our department and to also share it with other departments and Schools so we can all make sustainable changes.”

Other members of the Department involved in the project are Dr Mark Williams (Lab Manager), Fiona Biggerstaff (Technical Manager), Nicola Clements (Technician) and Dr Eilidh Martin, who is from Vision Sciences.