Team:TU Dresden/HP/Gold Integrated
Integrated Human Practices -iGEM goes green
"Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." — Peter Carr, Director of Judging
The iGEM competition encourages teams to consider the environmental implications of their projects. We took this sentence, published on the iGEM webpage, literally. With iGEM goes green we want to offer a new approach to share ways of ecological improvements of research projects and encourage as many teams and research groups as possible to get involved.
Talking to various experts in the field of sustainability and environmental protection made us realize that there is a lot to catch up on regarding sustainable lab work and research.
Therefore, we integrated all the comments and input we obtained from experts into the planning and implementation of the iGEM goes green initiative and our scientific project as well.
Research
As soon as we realized that we would need some help and expertise we got in contact with Toni Kiel, a business consultant for sustainability. In a first meeting, he introduced a concept for structuring our emissions to us:
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. The different gases 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.
Toni Kiel accompanied the development of our calculation tool for weeks and provided us with helpful sources and professional advice, so that we could assign all of our potential consumptions into scopes and eventually translate them into emissions. Thanks to his assistance we could actually determine the carbon footprint of our lab work.
Greenhouse gas calculation
Calculating the carbon footprint of our own lab work was an important goal for us, as it is the only way off actually determining the most influencing factors regarding GHG emissions. While there are a lot of online tools to calculate your personal carbon footprint or the carbon footprint of your travel by plane, train or bus, we found nothing comparable for the GHG of lab work. Since we set our minds on determining the factors that add most to the carbon footprint of our lab work there was no way around creating a tool by ourselves.
Figure 1 gives an overview on the GHG emissions that we calculated for our own lab work. The influence of scope 2 on the carbon footprint depends on the source of electricity and warmth. You can only prevent GHG emissions by using energy from renewable sources. Otherwise providers cause GHG emissions while producing electricity and warmth. Thus, it is possible to translate the energyconsumption into GHG emissions by multiplying the measured energyconsumption in kWh by the CO2-equivalents for the supply of 1 kWh as specified by your provider.
Scope 2 is divided into two parts: electricity and heating. As you can see electricityadds the most to our carbon footprint. According to our studies more than three quarters of the total GHG emissions of our lab work are caused because of the enormous power consumption of the ultra-low temperature freezer (-80°C) and our ice machine. Read the section “What have we done to integrate the gained knowledge and to reduce GHG emissions?” to see how we dealt with this problem.
There are no emissions listed for heating because we were not able to find any data for the heating of our lab. Since most of the time we spent in the lab was during the summer, we did not heat our lab for long periods of time. Therefore, we decided not to consider the emissions caused by heating.
The emissions of scope 3, are low compared to the emissions arising because of electricity. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the environmental impact that especially consumables have. The calculated carbon footprint does not reflect the total environmental consequences produced by the caused waste. On the one hand, this is because we were not able to investigate the GHG emissions of the downstream processing of our waste (waste treatment like incineration or recycling) and on the other hand GHG emissions cannot reflect other environmental effects waste causes like the persistence of plastic in the environment and its consequences.
For a detailed look on our consumptions and calculations check out our Excel file.
Integration
What have we done to integrate the gained knowledge and to reduce GHG emissions?
With the help of the GHG emission monitoring we wanted to detect the biggest influencing factors and draw conclusions for reducing our carbon footprint. This allowed us to integrate the gained knowledge into our project and change our behavior concerning lab work:
Avoiding power consumption of devices in the standby mode
We found out that some of our lab devices, e.g. scales and photometers, always consume power although they seemed to be turned off. This is because of the standby mode. Some devices have an additional switch to disconnect from the mains. For those that cannot be turned off completely we decided to pull the plug if the device is not in use for longer periods of time. Therefore, we can save energy without effort.
Reconsidering working routines
By sharing devices and thoroughly planning of experiments no-load running can be avoided and thus power consumption can be reduced. Sometimes it is reasonable to (literally) go the extra mile and incubate your plates in the 37°C room (if there is one at your institute) instead of turning on the incubator in your lab for incubating one petri dish. We tried to share as many devices as possible like our ultra-low temperature freezer, our ice-machine, autoclaves, thermocycler, plate reader etc with other working groups at our institute. Furthermore, we collected media and materials of the whole team for autoclaving or tried to autoclave our stuff together with materials that were needed for practical courses anyways. Reconsidering working routines means also to differentiate between reasonable actions and convenience. Is it necessary that computers or incubaters run all time?
Reconsidering machine settings
Ultra-low-temperature freezer
The power consumption of just one ULT freezer is equal to 2 - 3 average german households. [1]. That is why we have set our minds to rising the temperature of our ultra low temperature freezer from -80°C to -70°C which safes up to 40 % of its total energy consumption [2]. It was not hard to convince our head of institute of this action as he has an interest in prolonging the longevity of his device and raising the temperature reduces the burden on the compressor, making a failure of the system less likely. There is a lot of prove as well, that the sample quality is not influenced by storage at -70°C (have a look at this list of successfully preserved samples )
Surprisingly the setting to -80°C is only a result of marketing strategies and not of necessity. When we communicated our findings to other work groups they were surprised and open minded, so that now at least four freezers are set to -70°C with hopefully more to follow.
Autoclave
When we were looking into our working routines, we noticed that our default setting for the autoclave was at 134°C. As it is one of the devices with a high power consumption we tried to find ways of reducing its run time and a quick googles search revealed that a setting of 121°C is more than sufficient when working with S1 organisms. Higher temperatures are only necessary for persistent pathogens like prions. Naturally we adapted the settings to minimize the autoclaves power consumption.
Further achievements are listed on our experience page of iGEM goes green.
