Team:BostonU/Human Practices

Integrated Human Practices

Project LEO has great potential power to improve resource sustainability. For example, LEO has the potential to boost biofuel production by alleviating fitness costs associated with producing xylose isomerase, contributing to a cleaner energy economy. However, we found that our lab practices while developing LEO were unsustainable: leaving gel boxes on, constantly throwing gloves away, and forgetting to close the fume hood sash. We were wasting huge amounts of energy and resources. For example, leaving a fume hood open adds up to as much energy as 3.5 large U.S. households over the course of a year¹. In search of ways to make our work more environmentally friendly, we sought out green lab practices, and used these practices to guide our own experimental design and decision making. Moreover, inspired by the positive impact these practices had with little effort, we engaged with other scientists in an effort to promote sustainable lab practices.

Integrated Human Practices

Labs are major energy consumers

Taking inspiration from the prospect of using Project Leo to improve biofuel production, we set out to make our lab more environmentally-friendly. Using resources such as myGreenLab, we educated ourselves on major sources of waste in labs. At the same time, we connected with Sustainability@BU, an organization at Boston University dedicated to reducing the university's environmental footprint. Specifically, we learned about Sustainability@BU's efforts to pilot a Green Labs Initiative on campus. Labs are major sources of waste and energy consumption on university campuses, because of the equipment and facilities they require. For example, laboratory autoclaves use about 45 kWh of electricity per day - about the same as 2 large U.S. households².

Leveraging the combination of our own online research with information from Sustainability@BU's pilot studies on Green Labs, we brainstormed several ways to align our work in the lab with eco-friendly habits to reduce waste and conserve energy. But what could we hope to accomplish as a team of 3 undergraduates?

Every decision counts

Although we weren't in a position to affect decision-making on equipment purchases and updating facilities that would reduce our lab's impact, we could easily change our own behavior to reduce our contribution. At the core of our efforts to change our own habits, we recognized that every decision, even those which are seemingly minor, contributes to a larger impact.

What does that mean?

For us, implementing sustainable habits meant giving each decision a little extra thought. Did we really need to use 12 disposable culture tubes to grow our different yeast strains, or could we achieve the same result with a reusable culture block? Extra care in our decision making forced us to confront our impact in a way that illuminated opportunities to be more sustainable. We quickly put this extra care into practice, double-checking that equipment was turned off when not in use, incubators and freezers were properly closed, and sharing autoclave cycles with labmates. We kept a tally of many of our actions in a lab notebook, so we could later assess the impact of our actions. This tally later evolved as part of our collaboration with Sustainability@BU to improve their app to help scientists gauge their impact.

Lab Maintenance is a key area for reducing impact

Another theme from our work with Sustainability@BU was that lab maintenance work provides a major opportunity to improve impact.

Incubators and freezers are both significant energy consumers in the lab, because they expend energy to maintain a set temperature. When left open, not only are samples contained inside placed at risk, but the equipment consumes even more energy in an effort to keep its set temperature.

Over the course of the summer, one of the Khalil Lab's -20^oC freezers was open overnight because the ice buildup inside prevented the door from closing properly. Leaving the door open jeopardized valuable samples and enzymes inside, in addition to consuming a great deal of energy due to the extra work for the open freezer. Encouraged by this unfortunate event, we took another look at our online resources and found that developing a monthly schedule for de-icing freezers helps reduce energy consumption, in addition to ensuring that the freezer closes properly. We also got into the habit of double-checking our freezers and incubators to make sure they were properly closed (fun fact: one of our incubators only closes if you slam it like an old car door!).

Similarly, a single autoclave cycle can consume up to 900 liters of water¹. In order to reduce unnecessary use of the autoclave, we coordinated with our labmates to consolidate and share autoclave cycles, so the autoclave would be run less frequently. Tracking the number of autoclave cycles we consolidated was one way in which we sought to quantify our impact. In addition to consolidating autoclave cycles, we practiced meticulous sterile technique. After a mostly-full liter bottle of media was badly contaminated early in the summer, we recognized that contaminated media results in running more autoclave cycles. To reduce the impact of contamination, we made 50mL aliquots of media so that if contamination occurred, we wouldn't lose a full liter of media. Thus, practicing robust sterile technique and aliquoting media allowed us to use less energy and water to autoclave media.

Experimental Design & eVOLVER

Our conscious efforts to be more sustainable in the lab guided every decision we made regarding experimental design. The Khalil Lab's culturing platform, eVOLVER, was an excellent tool that allowed us to exert control over an array of parameters while maintaining high throughput of data. In addition, the eVOLVER was designed such that all of its vials and sensors are reusable, eliminating a significant source of waste. However, preparing the eVOLVER is a highly involved protocol that involves bleaching and flushing fluidic lines, autoclaving vials, and making about 3 liters of media. Thus, it was clear to us that minimizing the environmental impact of our use of the eVOLVER would require careful planning of experiments.

Since the eVOLVER preparation involved using a lot of energy and resources, we wanted to make sure that any colonies we tested in the eVOLVER were inducing properly. In order to test our colonies, we grew them overnight in a reusable 24-well culture block in 2mL of media in our shaking incubator, then used a photography lamp with a colored bulb to induce for 8 hours. Including 60:40 cells:media dilutions every hour, these experiments used approximately 205 mLs of media at maximum - less than 15-fold of the media required for an eVOLVER experiment.

Once we verified that our colonies worked, we restruck plates with the best colonies so we wouldn't need to keep testing new ones for future experiments. Then, we used our verified colonies in eVOLVER experiments to gather robust characterization data. The Khalil Lab uses a Google Calendar to coordinate eVOLVER experiments, making it very easy for us to plan out dates for our eVOLVER experiments. To further minimize our energy consumption, we scheduled eVOLVER experiments in pairs when possible, so that we could autoclave as many vials as possible in one cycle.

Outreach

NEGEM

Our first step towards spreading the word on sustainable practices was at the iGEM Team Meetup, NEGEM, that we hosted with BostonU Hardware. At NEGEM, we presented our tips on how to be more sustainable in the lab and held a discussion on measures to be more environmentally conscious with our lab work.

GreenGEM

We then compiled ways to be more green in the lab, sorting them into four groups: 1) Equipment, 2) Facilities, 3) Contamination, Safety, and Chemical Use, and 4) Collaboration. GreenGEM builds off of TU Dresden 2017’s iGEM Goes Green project, in which the team constructed a guide for green lab practices. GreenGEM aims to create a more user-friendly and easily digestible guide to help scientists get started on sustainable practices. Not only does GreenGEM present ways to be green in the lab, it also refers scientists to other resources to read through if they want more information on environmentally friendly practices. Check out GreenGEM here!

2018 iGEM Sustainable Labs Challenge

While tracking our own sustainable actions helped us generally gauge how sustainable our lab habits were, we didn't have an easy way to quantify our impact or compare to others. Fortunately, through our connections with Sustainability@BU, we were aware of the Sustainability@BU app, which allows users to track their sustainable actions and automatically calculates their impact in three critical environmental areas: CO₂ emissions, waste production, and water conservation. In collaboration with Sustainability@BU, we developed a list of lab-related actions that were added to the app to help scientists track the impact of environmentally-friendly lab practices. Our sustainable actions include using multi-use consumables such as culture blocks, sharing autoclave cycles, and powering down equipment that is not in use. These actions will remain on the app to help Sustainability@BU shape their Green Labs Initiative!

To that end, we collaborated with Sustainability@BU to design the 2018 iGEM Sustainable Labs Challenge, hosted on the Sustainability@BU App. The challenge lasted 2 weeks and four iGEM teams participated: iGEM Bulgaria, BostonU, BostonU_HW, and LASA iGEM. Participating teams successfully practiced sustainable lab habits to achieve impressive impact!


These results demonstrate that even a few scientists working together to encourage each other to practice environmentally-friendly habits in the lab can have a surprisingly sizeable environmental impact.

Biological Design Center Sustainability Month

Capitalizing on the success of the iGEM Sustainable Labs Challenge, BostonU is broadening the scope of our efforts by facilitating a Sustainability Month in the Biological Design Center, where our lab is hosted. The Biological Design Center Sustainability Month will feature a month-long Sustainable Labs Challenge in which scientists will track their sustainable actions to compete for small prizes. We aim to encourage participation through friendly competition and prizes, while educating our fellow scientists on best practices for environmentally-friendly labs. In addition, we are coordinating with the BDC executive team to host guest speakers who can introduce our colleagues to the larger community of scientists dedicated to improving sustainability in labs. BostonU continues to spearhead integration of sustainable lab practices, helping Boston University Sustainability pilot a Green Labs Initiative.