lab sustainability

How To Reopen Your Lab With Sustainability In Mind

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva

If you’re preparing to return to the lab for the first time in months, there’s never been a better time to make your lab more sustainable.

Earlier this year, the COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of labs to temporarily shut down. As restrictions are lifted in many areas, scientists are slowly resuming research. However, reopening a lab after months of closure will require a lot of cleaning and organizing, much like a fresh start. This presents a valuable opportunity to evaluate your lab’s practices and identify ways that you can reduce your environmental impact.

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Lab Sustainability: Easy as 1-2-3

Posted on by Darcia Schweitzer

Sustainability is a bit of buzzword lately—for good reason—but knowing how to be more sustainable and actually putting sustainable practices in action are not the same thing. This may be one reason why scientists have been slow to adopt change in their laboratories. By sponsoring My Green Lab, we’re hoping to help spread the message that there are simple changes researchers can make in their labs to significantly impact sustainability.

Here are some easy ways to reduce energy, water and waste in your lab and start making your research more sustainable.

1. Energy

Compared to office buildings on campus, academic lab buildings consume 5 times more energy. To put that into perspective, labs typically consume 50% of the energy on a university campus despite occupying less than 30% of the space. Fortunately, reducing energy usage can be one of the easiest ways to make your lab more sustainable.

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Making Research More Sustainable, One Lab at a Time

Posted on by Darcia Schweitzer

Do you love your research job? What if you couldn’t do that work anymore? What if future researchers couldn’t have the opportunity to build from what you have accomplished and feel the same joy you do about their research?

Unfortunately, these may become more than hypotheticals for the next generation of scientists due to the impact humans are having on the earth. Scientific research has an outsized impact on some aspects of our unsustainable use of resources. Academic research buildings can use four times more energy than a typical office building and can be responsible for one-third of all waste generated on campus. So, can you make scientific research more sustainable?

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Celebrate World Migratory Bird Day by Reducing Your Plastic Use

Posted on by Michele Arduengo

One of the most noticeable phenological events of Spring in the Midwest United States is the arrival of the red winged black birds in March. These birds fly in from the South and take up residence on fence posts, power lines and tall reeds, creating a a weaving of red and yellow and black against a still brown backdrop. Shortly after the blackbirds arrive, the first robins of spring greet us and sandhill cranes fly in along with many other species.


These migratory birds that serve as heralds of spring are celebrated on World Migratory Bird Day (#WMBD #WMBD2019 #BirdDay). This day is celebrated twice a year, on the second Saturday in May and the second Saturday in October.

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Lab Sustainability Doesn’t Have To Be Painful

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva

Ian Nicastro says he didn’t set out to start a green revolution.

“I’m not hardcore ‘Save the trees,’” Ian says. “I’m probably a little different from the people you traditionally see as promoting the sustainability thing. Obviously, I do want to help the environment, but for me it was like, ‘this is logical, and we should be doing this.’”

Ian is the lab manager of the Pasquinelli Lab, a C. elegans lab at the University of California–San Diego that studies miRNA and its role in processes like aging. He’s been in the lab for about six and a half years, splitting his time between research and lab management duties. According to Allison Paradise, the CEO of My Green Lab, Ian has put out some “outstanding” efforts to implement sustainable practices in the lab. Continue reading “Lab Sustainability Doesn’t Have To Be Painful”