Sustainability Student Research Award Nomination
Emory Green Labs Project: Rachel Croessmann, Kate McDonald, Andrew Park, Erin Saven
Background
As part of the CSR & Sustainability class taught by Prof. Peter Roberts in Spring 2010 at Goizueta Business School, students were assigned a project for the Emory University’s Office of Sustainability. The projects were designed to enable students to both learn about and live through the challenges faced when trying to make real-world organizations more sustainable.
The project to develop and market the Green Lab was described as follows:
What defines a green lab and how do we market this concept to individual departments at Emory to generate buy-in of the concept? With research provided by the Yale Center for Green Chemistry, the project includes developing criteria that define what makes a lab green, creating a user-friendly certification process and developing a marketing plan and materials to build usage among Emory’s health and research labs.
Summary
Based on extensive research with key contacts within Emory University and at other institutions, students determined that a comprehensive green lab program encompasses many different elements, ranging from efforts to reduce the use of toxic inputs and by-products in chemical reactions, to behavioral changes by researchers to reduce energy and water consumption, to upgrading facilities and equipment in the labs. Although an ideal program would include all of these elements, few university programs do.
The students proposed three primary recommendations, all of which can be implemented simultaneously. The recommendations include assessments, education and documented energy savings.
First, lab sustainability assessments should be conducted to better understand the range of current practices. Teams with expertise in environmental health and safety and facility management as well as students and lab managers would examine water use, material purchase and recycling practices, and toxic waste production. Regular assessments would ensure that changes are made in areas with the greatest potential impact.
Second, a website should be developed to showcase a Model Green Lab, documenting best practices, categorizing areas of sustainable lab practices, archiving new resources and documenting case studies from Emory’s lab assessments. The site is the best way to communicate with Emory’s decentralized scientific community as well as reduce the time and effort required to sort through the volume of information available online and in print.
The final recommendation is an educational campaign to reduce energy consumption in the lab by targeting viable air volume fume hood sashes. The fume hoods represent the “low hanging fruit” in Emory’s labs, consuming the majority of energy in the labs which are responsible for 27% of the university’s total energy use.
The students’ research is extensive and strongly supports the importance of all three components of the recommendations to “green” Emory’s labs and the project thoroughly analyzes the rationale for each recommendation while also considering the implementation process. The report consists of a power point presentation as well as a 10 page written document.