How can laboratories decrease their enormous impact on the environment?
Students from Leiden University conduct research in government operations/procurement departments.
“How can the government make their operation more sustainable?” The student team ‘the Labrats’ research possibilities within the governmental laboratories. Humanity needs laboratories to maintain and improve our common future. However, the world’s laboratories generate 2 percent of the world’s plastic waste and consume high amounts of energy and water, resulting in an unpredictably high climate impact for such a tiny industry. It is this dichotomy between the laboratories’ criticality in creating a sustainable future and their negative impacts on sustainability that piqued the Labrats interest in tackling the challenge of circularity in the Netherlands’ governmental laboratories.
Research team the Labrats
We are the Labrats, a research team composed of Hajar, Kristie, Parth, Quan and Thomas, all students of the joint MSc Industrial Ecology at Leiden University and TU Delft. The Dutch laboratory government, RIVM, gave us the assignment to research “Guidelines for laboratories”. During this project we are learning a lot about laboratory equipment supply chains, Dutch laboratory governance and operations, as well as the underlying currents of driving and implementing change. These guidelines are drafted based on the production chains of laboratory supplies, business operations of the governmental laboratories and the policy processes that drive and implement changes. Although the team has received ample support from the project commissioners, they face a few obstacles in elaborating a uniform pathway for integrating sustainability in laboratories’ culture. Since there are seven different laboratories, and all of them have different structures and requirements, each lab’s needs would need to be covered by the resulting recommendations. And in addition, a perceived trade-off between 2 sustainability and efficiency is a threat to the laboratories’ green transition, emphasizing the challenge to align all stakeholders’ priorities.
3-pronged approach
As Industrial Ecology pupils, we understand the importance of a systemic approach to
implementing a long lasting change. We, as a team, developed a holistic 3-pronged
approach to target the challenge of lab circularity. Our analysis will start with
purchasing the goods for laboratories, then we will dig into the daily laboratory operations and ends as the loop divides into the different waste streams. To gather all relevant perspectives, the team is applying a diverse range of techniques, combining the use of qualitative assessments and quantitative methods, and ranging in focus from environmental impacts assessments to governance and transition analysis. Although Rome wasn’t built in a day, the bricks were laid every hour. Following this principle, the Labrats aim at providing a pathway of recommendations for the governmental laboratories’ that will provide the labs with a smooth and sustainable transition into circularity by 2030.
Results of the research, January 2023
When we look at the governmental laboratories today and imagine a sustainable laboratory in the future, there are many differences. For the futural sustainable labs, we envision that the large volumes of packaging waste we see today are shrinking and reused where possible. Energy-intensive devices are managed optimally, both during their use and once they are no longer needed. And although single-use plastic items have enabled great strides in operational efficiency within labs, we must reintroduce the reuse of these items. The above are just a few examples of what the future can hold if sustainability is prioritized. Crucially, the laboratories of today are not equipped to make these kinds of sustainable changes yet. Often, the workload is too high, which results in sustainability is seen as an unaffordable luxury topic to talk about with a lack of coordination on this topic between the different departments. In some cases, individual researchers or facility managers can already make a difference, but overall, coordinated, top-down efforts are required to enable a sustainability transition. Such action is currently still lacking, but we hope this will soon change.
