Environmental Sustainability in Laboratory Settings
Laboratories are huge carbon consumers, due to their high energy usage and single-use product waste. So in order to “do our part” within wider goals to reduce carbon emissions, we need to change how we work.
Due to the size of the Conservation and Museum Advisory Service (CMAS) lab (maximum of five people between both the archive and objects labs), I’ve been working on areas that we can control easily within the lab, as it is hard to argue the importance of it for our small department within Wiltshire Council as a whole. This has allowed me to focus on low-budget solutions for some of the wider areas of concern. Da Silva and Henderson (2011) identified three main areas of concern for conservation lab spaces in relation to sustainability; energy consumption, waste management, and procurement.
Energy Consumption
Lab spaces use 4-5x the energy of other commercial spaces. This, of course, is due to the number of processes and machinery used within labs. Energy use and wastage is directly related to carbon emissions due to the limited use of renewable sources to provide this energy.
In order to minimise our usage, and thus, minimise the production of CO2 through the use of natural gas, an obvious solution has been put in place: turn off the lights. Since our team is small and our labs demonstrate large windows, this is a fairly easy solution. Beyond this, it is also important to keep fume hoods shut when they are not actively being worked in. Not only does this limit the amount of air pushed through the extraction and thus the energy usage, but it also helps limit health and safety risks for anyone working within the lab. My current work is surrounding an energy audit, which involves testing all of the machinery and kit within the lab to see how much energy it uses, along with setup times and general usage time. This will allow us to know what kit is more energy intensive and hopefully change the way we interact with different processes in the lab.
Waste Management
Waste management is the area that is focused on the most when considering environmental sustainability and conservation labs. This is due to conservation being a material-intensive field. Unfortunately, whilst recycling is a noble action, not all cellulosic products (acid-free tissue, some cardboard, etc.) cannot be recycled. Furthermore, recycling is energy-intensive and varies by type of plastic. Beyond this, there are issues with solvent disposal and hazardous waste and, of course, gloves.
Thus, we must find ways to better handle the waste that we produce in the treatment of objects. The central idea for more environmentally sustainable waste management in all laboratories is to reduce and reuse first, then consider recycling. This involves the use of small offcuts of Plastazote, Melinex, etc., as well as a general reduction of solutions that are thrown away. Ideally, a waste audit should be performed within a lab in order to determine what is thrown away most and how we can limit our waste. Unfortunately, due to the small size of our lab (and very efficient janitorial team), we have not been able to achieve this. Nevertheless, we demonstrate limited waste outside of chemical/hazardous waste and gloves. Currently, we are disposing of our gloves in a separate container from general waste. This is in hopes of getting funding to recycle the gloves using Terracycle or similar.
Procurement
Procurement is the hardest area to work with, particularly in a small laboratory. This primarily deals with the embodied carbon of different materials utilised in lab spaces, from chemicals to cotton swabs. The main push within the larger scientific community is for Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), which demonstrates the carbon emissions from every stage of a product, from its synthesis to its disposal. Unfortunately, this analysis is time-intensive and can be expensive. Groups like My Green Lab have attempted to centralise much of this information and make it easy to use through the ACT labels. These labels, similar to those you’d find on most food products, demonstrate the environmental impact of different products used in laboratories, from graduated cylinders to dichloromethane.
However, within the conservation field, there is much more limited research as we straddle the museum and science worlds. Ki Culture has presented several books on different materials for packing and storage of objects that are more environmentally friendly than synthetic foams and non-recyclable papers. But these materials demonstrate both limited testing and can be cost-prohibitive. Therefore, there must be a push to fund research and institutions that champion these materials, so as to limit our own carbon footprint as a field.