How going green can raise cash for your lab

The freezers were stuffed and their racks encrusted in ice, with a thin blanket of snow covering all the sample boxes inside. Such was the state of the cold-storage system in Hopi Hoekstra’s laboratory a decade after the evolutionary biologist and her team started studying the genetics and behaviour of deer mice there.

Kyle Turner, manager of the lab at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was about to spend more than US$10,000 on a new ultra-low-temperature (ULT) freezer. Then he heard about a competition called the North American Laboratory Freezer Challenge, which had been launched in January 2017 by two US non-profit organizations — My Green Lab, in Los Gatos, California, and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL), in Annandale, Virginia.

The challenge, which is now international, urges labs to reduce energy consumption and improve equipment life through various measures. Some of those include defrosting freezers, to eliminate crusty ice and provide more space for samples, and raising the temperature set‑point on ULT freezers from −80 °C to −70 °C, to cut electricity demands.

The Hoekstra lab won first place in the individual-laboratory category for an academic institution. Lab members also freed so much space in their two existing ULT freezers that, despite accumulating new research materials, they haven’t yet needed to buy a third.

The energy savings helped to cut Harvard’s electricity bill by around $2,500 a year, according to My Green Lab, and slashed annual greenhouse-gas emissions by the equivalent of 4.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide — roughly what would be saved by taking three cars off the road. It also meant that Hoekstra’s lab could spend the funds earmarked for a new freezer on other science-related expenses instead.

Hoekstra likens it to “a free $10,000 grant” — and is using the money to send some trainees to this August’s Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montpellier, France. The funds will also help to support a high-throughput gene-expression analysis of brain cells from two related species of deer mouse.

Campus sustainability initiatives are usually framed as ways for scientists to shrink their carbon footprints and bring down energy costs (see Nature 546, 565–567; 2017). But the Hoekstra lab’s experience shows that there are other reasons to pool surplus reagents, share equipment or keep better tabs on lab chemicals to avoid duplicate purchasing. “These exercises are about helping science as much as they are about helping the planet,” says Peter James, director of S-Lab, a UK initiative based in London that promotes sustainable lab practices. “They free up resources that can be applied for scientific purposes.”

Bounty hunters

One increasingly popular way to cut lab waste and operational costs is through exchange programmes for surplus resources. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for example, more than 230 research and teaching laboratories now routinely share leftover chemicals, equipment and materials through a campus-wide recycling and reuse initiative.

“Before this programme, these were thrown in the trash or disposed of as hazardous waste for a price,” says Sudhakar Reddy, who co-ordinated the university’s sustainability efforts until his retirement last December. Now, he estimates, more than one-third of all unexpired and unused lab resources get passed on to other researchers, who leap on the surplus bounty — saving themselves a combined total of more than $250,000 a year.

One new recruit, pulmonary-health researcher Benjamin Singer, freely acquired two high-end microscopes — valued at more than $6,000 apiece — which he now uses to study donated human-brain specimens for molecular signs of injury after a critical illness. A second researcher, cell biologist Anthony Vecchiarelli, saved more than $10,000 while kitting out his lab with free peristaltic pumps, circulating water baths, slide warmers and consumables. “I check the website almost weekly for goodies,” says Vecchiarelli. “It is a valuable resource for a new investigator.”

Not all academics have such a website at their fingertips, however. Garry Cooper didn’t when he was a postdoc studying neurophysiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. And it was while he was helping to clean out a lab freezer one day in 2015 that he realized there was a need for such a platform: he’d been handing a PhD student some expensive reagents, but still throwing away bagfuls of antibodies, a common, yet pricey, research tool for identifying proteins.

He decided to create a company to reduce wasteful spending and promote trading among colleagues. He envisaged it as a kind of e

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