{"id":8573,"date":"2019-11-13T22:44:24","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T21:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8573"},"modified":"2019-11-13T22:44:24","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T21:44:24","slug":"scientific-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8573","title":{"rendered":"scientific sustainability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"00003\"<\/a>I work in a lab and labs are not very sustainable.\u00a0 The problem areas in scientific research fall into three main areas.\u00a0 Travel, plastics and energy.<\/p>\n

For me apart from how I get to and from work (mainly by train and cycling), this is not an issue.\u00a0 For many academics and to a certain extent the private sector this is more of an problem. I have read and heard a variety of views from academics recently from the total non-flying angle to the I have to go and its not the conference speeches I would miss but the networking.\u00a0 When I did my PhD I was allowed a trip to one conference.\u00a0 I went to Barcelona by sleeper.\u00a0 (The group that flew from my University were stuck on the ground for 12 hours due to a technical problem, at least on the way out.\u00a0 But to be fair they probably still got there quicker.)\u00a0 Most people recognise they at least need to cut down on the flying.<\/p>\n

The second big problem is plastics.\u00a0 Our lab gets through enormous quantities of these. These fall into two main areas.\u00a0 Cell culture and pipettes.\u00a0 Cell culture flasks are plastic and both the plastic and the cells that are grown in them are optimised to grow on this material.\u00a0 The plastic is wetable.\u00a0 That is, its modified so than it being made of a simple repeating uncharged polymer there are charged groups on it.\u00a0 This means it is water loving and the liquid water does not form raised bubbles on it but spreads out. It also means cells potentially attach.\u00a0 The lab I work in reuses one type of cell culture flask entirely for cost reasons.\u00a0 Even then they do not last forever.<\/p>\n

The other use of plastics is pipetting.\u00a0 Pipettes are simply a means of transferring a known volume of liquid.\u00a0 They range in volume from 50ml to less than a \u00b5L (millionth of a litre).\u00a0 They are all plastic.\u00a0 Here there have been modest changes.\u00a0 We now recycle the boxes the pipettes come in. But not the pipette tips themselves. One possibility is to go back to glass.\u00a0 When I was a student, many of the larger volume pipettes were glass.\u00a0 The small tips I\u2019m not sure could work as glass, there is also a living organism health and safety issue.\u00a0 Cell culture flasks would be much more tricky since as I stated above the the entire process is optimised for plastics.\u00a0 Another problem is that for safety reasons that everything is autoclaved.\u00a0 To be fair you are not allowed to just chuck stuff out with living things on.\u00a0 Edinburgh University was fined an enormous amount when I worked there for release of GM organisms.\u00a0 Of course autoclaves use an enormous amount of energy.<\/p>\n

This brings neatly me to the last area – energy. Apart from autoclaves, scientists love freezing things.\u00a0 Usually at -20\u00baC but also at -80\u00baC.\u00a0 These very low temperature freezers use enormous quantities of electricity.\u00a0 Where I worked at Edinburgh University they put them all in one room (-20\u00baC and -80\u00baC).\u00a0 The noise was deafening and of course the room needed cooling (which didn\u2019t work well enough, since the building was built under PFI).<\/p>\n

Things are changing, slowly.\u00a0 In the three years I have working in the lab more stuff can now be recycled.\u00a0 For instance all the plastic containers that the cell culture medium is delivered in can now be recycled (and more surprisingly their lids) and this is a lot of plastic.\u00a0 Pipette boxes ditto.\u00a0 We have been told to cut down the autoclave use as far as possible and fill it up.\u00a0 Since we are now charged per session.<\/p>\n

I personally reuse pipette tips as far as possible.\u00a0 There is research underway on living organism disposal and even storing samples at -70\u00baC which uses a lot less energy than -80\u00baC. Some universities have pledged to go plastic free and to do so truly do will involve their labs.\u00a0 The dichotomy of us who strain to use less plastic and energy at home but chuck stuff away willy nilly at work is not lost on me.<\/p>\n

We have a long way to go to reach true scientific sustainability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I work in a lab and labs are not very sustainable.\u00a0 The problem areas in scientific research fall into three main areas.\u00a0 Travel, plastics and energy. For me apart from how I get to and from work (mainly by train … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,210,1],"tags":[205,274],"class_list":["post-8573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-plastic-waste","category-uncategorized","tag-plastic-waste","tag-recycling"],"yoast_head":"\nscientific sustainability - The oil lamp - shining God's light on peak oil<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8573\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8573\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=8573\",\"name\":\"scientific sustainability - 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