GoGreenGuide

This Guideline gives useful tips for how lab work can be more sustainable by thoughtful planning and conscious usage of resources. Furthermore, it contains suggestions for more environmental friendly conferences and meetings. The guideline also outlines how greenhouse gas emissions of a lab and for flights can be calculated and compensated for. Most of the tips are easy to implement in a daily working routine and do not require a lot of effort for scientists to adopt.

"Green Your Lab" Poster

The most important lab work related tips are summarized in a poster. It was created to hang it on the wall in your lab as a reminder to work greener.

The Calculator

This Excel based tool offers teams the opportunity to calculate their team´s carbon footprint that is related to the laboratory work. Consumables, heating and electricity consumptions can be entered to get a summary of the CO₂ emissions of the lab.

To understand the structure and which information need to be implemented in the Calculator, we first have to explain the term “scopes”:
GHG emissions can be classified by scopes that reflect different forms of emission. “Scope 1” relates to direct emissions caused, for instance, by burning coal. This scope is not relevant for our calculation as laboratories normally do not produce any direct emissions. “Scope 2” relates to indirect emissions caused by the generation of warmth and electricity and “Scope 3” accounts for all the other indirect emissions related to your work.

The unit for measuring the global warming potential of the emitted greenhouse gases (GHG) is CO₂, thus your result will be also given in CO₂ units. The different other gases occurring are multiplied with a factor that reflects their harmfulness for our climate. For instance, methane is 12.4 times as damaging as carbon dioxide, so one ton of methane accounts for 12.4 tons of CO₂.

Let’s have a look at the different sheets included in the Calculator:

Scope 2 – Heating implements that you heat your lab yourself or it is heated together with the rest of the building. If we want to be precise, air conditioning also belongs here. We haven’t been able to find any data about our lab. Instead, only annual consumption data for the whole building, also including office rooms etc., is recorded which is not suitable for our purposes. Maybe you are more lucky?

For the calculations of the “Scope 2 – Electricity" sheet, it is important to know that the data will always be more precise if you measure the power consumption instead of calculating it, as the stated performance of the equipment is almost always different in reality. The GHG emissions per kWh depend heavily on the energy source you use. It is different in each country and even in each city. The ideal approach would be to identify the GHG emission for the power mix of your city or at least of your country. We provide data which refers to the average power mix of Germany. >/br> In summary that means: try to get your hands on a powermeter and measure some runs of all your devices! If this is not possible, you don`t have any other option than calculating your energy consumption (usually gives higher values).

"Scope 3" can include a lot of things. This could be the manufacturing of the products you use, the (environmental) cost of their shipping, your business trips, your daily commute and basically everything else you like to take in account. It is important to set the boundaries of your calculation at that point. Our team took in account the consumables and chemicals we use in our daily lab routine. They are interesting factors, as we hope to limit our consumption effectively after identifying the factors that add most to our footprint. The GHG emissions for “Scope 3” are normally measured from cradle to gate, meaning all of the production stages from the raw material up to the finished product leaving the gate of the factory are taken into account. We are not able to include the GHG emissions of the shipping, as these vary too much, but we would still like to encourage you to make collective orders to save on shipping. Neither included in our data are recycling or disposal of the used consumables and here again we would like to motivate you to separate your waste and recycle and reuse as much as possible. If you miss any items on the list of consumables, it is mostly due to the lack of data provided for that specific product. Especially the list of GHG emissions for chemicals is rather short. In many cases the data we do have is actually given for a similar or an intermediate product. Please treat the calculated results accordingly. The result will not reflect your real carbon footprint but it will give you an estimate. This estimate can be used to identify the prominent factors that add to your emissions and can give you an idea about the proportions of the impact the different factors have.

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All our documents can also be found here: GitHub