14-20 September is Recycle Week in the UK, and we’re happy that it aligns with our announcement that CELT Global Health’s chemistry labs have received the Gold LEAF Award.
Recycle Week is overseen by Recycle Now, a Wrap organisation. Since 2004 this week has been used as a “celebration of recycling across the nation, helping everybody to recycle more of the right things, more often.”
The Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics – Global Health (CELT Global Health), directed by Professor Steve Rannard and Professor Andrew Owen, is highly invested in our environmental sustainability. A large part of that includes our laboratory teams’ hard work towards our Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) Awards.
The purpose of the LEAF Awards is to help researchers like us to consider the environmental impact of our laboratory spaces. Labs use significantly more resources to run than standard office space of the same size, through energy, water and waste.
Last year all the CELT Global Health labs achieved a Silver LEAF Award well ahead of the University of Liverpool’s LEAF schedule. We wrote a piece explaining the changes that we implemented to achieve it. This year, on World Environment Day, we announced that the pharmacology labs within the team achieved a Gold LEAF Award and now, for Recycle Week, we’re delighted to announce that our chemistry labs have been awarded the Gold LEAF award, so we now have Gold across all our labs.
We’re incredibly proud of our chemists’ hard work to reach this milestone, so we spoke to the University of Liverpool Sustainability team’s Laboratory Sustainability Officer, Jenna Lowe, to discuss the changes the team made to reach this accolade in the space of just a year.
What steps did CELT Global Health’s chemistry labs take towards for our Gold LEAF Award?
Sustainability is a whole team effort within our chemistry labs, with everyone taking ownership of their work and regularly scheduled environmental and cleaning activities. These include:
Reuse of materials
- We reuse plastic and glass winchesters for chemical waste, rather than purchasing new containers just for waste purposes. We used to return our glass containers and purchase plastic ones for our disposal, but now we use, and reuse, used glass ones
- Our chemistry labs work mostly with glassware, and most of the time it can be cleaned and reused, as long as that won’t impact the quality of our results
- We have started reusing our tip boxes to hold other items around our lab, such as samples. Any that we can’t reuse, we send for recycling rather than to landfill.
Reducing travel / adopting low-carbon travel
- We often attend events remotely and most of our conferences are in the UK so we can travel by train
- Most of our work with international partners is over Teams with infrequent international travel.
Using LEDs for equipment illumination
- Our chemistry labs don’t require microscopes. However, we’ve prioritised LED lights in the lightbox we use to photograph our samples.
Excess equipment and materials are shared, repaired or sold
- Our chemistry team work hard to try repairing any items first, such as when we tried to fix our liquid nitrogen generator but the engineers said it couldn’t be. Even then, we donated it to the Unigreen scheme so it can still be used for parts rather than throw it away. We later received an email telling us they had sold it to a private lab in the UK.
Using water for cooling and making sure it’s recirculated
- Our Chemistry labs don’t have any machines that use single pass cooling
- We have a microfluidizer that doesn’t recirculate but it only uses around 2 litres of water, and we use it infrequently
- Our benchtop ultrasonicators recirculate a mixture of tap water and coolants in a closed loop system so it doesn’t require new water each time.
Energy impact of computational analysis and coding
- Our chemistry team don’t use a lot, but any scripts we need are short and optimised.
- CELT Global Health has a modelling team that have a real impact on our experimental efficiency, as we can concentrate on work we have a good idea will be effective so avoid repeat experimentation.
Systems in place to promote efficient use of data and samples
- We work collaboratively across our team and departments, and we store information in collaborative spaces. All our SEM and XRD data is accessible across the team, so repeat samples are not required
- We’ve set up data storage that can be shared with external collaborators as part of the newly established UK Hub for Advanced Long-acting Therapeutics (HALo)
- Near to 100% of chemicals are logged on the Electronic Lab Notebook system. All chemicals and samples listed have a barcode for checking in and checking out once they’re empty so there’s s a record of what’s in store. This is used across the whole Department of Chemistry, so everyone knows what and where everything is to best promote sharing
- Yearly waste records are used so we know when things need to be disposed of.
Lab management software
- As explained above, we use the Electric Lab Notebook system for our chemical inventory
- We use Safety Net for our document records.
Sterilisation and cleanliness methods
- Our chemistry lab equipment doesn’t require an autoclave for cleaning, which has a real impact on our energy consumption
- A monthly cleaning schedule is utilised to make sure everything is clean and dust free, which ensures the integrity of our samples
- We clean our benches with chemgene and ethanol between experiments to avoid contamination.
Sinks and drains
- These are used appropriately
- We don’t pour anything down the drain. Our chemistry team organise for all waste chemicals to be collected by an external contractor
- We have spill kits in our labs, which allow us to contain spills to prevent them from spreading and entering watercourses
- We utilise information signage as a reminder not to put things down the drain.
Solvents evaporated to the atmosphere
- Our chemistry team use safety funnels and lids on top of the solvent waste containers to minimise evaporation
- We implemented valve safety caps on solvent containers outside of our fume hood to prevent waste into the atmosphere
- Our team work to select solvents that are as least hazardous as possible: for example, ethanol instead of methanol.
Sustainability in corresponding office spaces
- We use paperless COSHH and safety sheet procedures
- A highlight was the reuseable safety sheets, work in progress sheets and overnight forms our team has set up, rather than printing new sheets each time
- A wastepaper bin is no longer required in our chemistry office as there is no paper waste anymore. The University recycling provision is used for any office waste that’s created, so office bins weren’t necessary.
Bronze and Silver upkeep
As well as the work our chemistry team did towards the Gold LEAF Award, Jenna also had to go through our Silver and Bronze LEAF Award upkeep.
- She looked at our induction materials and was pleased to see that sustainability is included, so the conversation starts at the very beginning of employment including a link to a SharePoint site providing more details such as lab specific information
- Our ordering is logged on a communal whiteboard that our team can add to as they go. We can use University stores, and notify each other through Teams as we add items to the list to avoid duplication and ordering more than is needed
- Our chemistry labs only need one fridge and freezer. They are still kept up to the high organisation standard with labelling, and defrosted regularly to ensure efficiency for the previous Silver LEAF Award upkeep.
The hard work doesn’t end here. LEAF standards are audited every year. Not only will keep up with the changes we’ve made, but we shall endeavour to find ways to improve where we can. The audit isn’t the same each year, so we will also adapt to any new criteria as they arise. All of our labs are Gold LEAF standard now and we intend to keep it that way.
We are working incredibly hard to create long-acting medical options for patients most in need, including those from the most underserved populations. We know our work is important and has the opportunity for a real global impact. However, we are also keenly aware that we want the people who benefit from our work to have a healthy world to live in, and we will always do our bit for them.
#RecycleWeek