Resources
Consumables (including single use plastics, or medium and other products) are a major source of environmental impacts in the lab, especially during their production and disposal stages.
- Design your experiment by brainstorming with your colleagues about how to generate the least waste, and favor material reuse or recycling.
- Autoclave your consumables and accessories only when necessary. Autoclaving is an energy intensive process that can be replaced by high temperature washing in some cases.
- Check your experiment design, some of your experiments might not require sterilized tips. When in doubt, ask. This is a simple everyday action which can have a great impact on reducing your environmental impact.
- Also, most pipette tips in their boxes are already sterilized by the manufacturers at purchase, and thus do not require additional autoclaving.
- Use a system in your laboratory shelves to differentiate tip boxes which were autoclaved, and those which weren’t. Example: Autoclaved tip boxes are identified with a colored tape.
Mind the bin type:
- Sort your non-contaminated recyclable waste (aluminum, paper, glass…) in EcoPoints. Bring other non-contaminated waste to the SV or AI recycling points. Bring non-contaminated plastics to the outside containers.
- Use hazardous waste bins exclusively for contaminated waste. This serves to avoid non-contaminated waste undergoing unnecessary energy-intensive end-of-life processing. Follow SV and EPFL waste guidelines.
Go Back
