On May 16-17th our President Carlo Battisti represented My Green Lab at the first labsummit organised in Coimbra (Portugal) together with LFE’s Steering Committee Secretary and MGL CEO James Connelly.
labsummit® aimed to promote an inspiring environment where participants could update themselves, share knowledge, establish partnerships, and drive the advancement of the laboratory industry. The event provided a conducive environment to discuss important issues for the laboratory sector, such as innovation, technology, regulations, and challenges faced by professionals. The labsummit concept was based on four distinct pillars: Laboratory, Digital, Productivity, and Sustainability. These pillars represent the main concerns and challenges faced by laboratory professionals, who are constantly seeking valuable solutions and information to improve the efficiency, quality, and sustainability of laboratory processes.
In particular, My Green Lab provided some valuable content on labs sustainability and roadmap to the decarbonisation of the life science sector (research, biotech, pharma, academia, health, food) through two sessions in the main auditorium:
- James held a keynote speech on ‘Achieving Carbon Neutrality In Scientific Operations: My Green Lab’s Breakthrough Initiatives And Industry Collaboration’
- after that, Carlo moderated a panel discussion on ‘Bringing Sustainability in the Lab’, featuring, beside James, Dr. Kerstin Hermuth-Kleinschmidt, Sustainability Consultant and owner at NIUB Sustainability Consulting
In this second session, the three panelists interacted with the attendees, sharing thoughts and best practices on how to address those which represent maybe the most impactful lab environmental issues: energy, water, and waste. For all those stakeholders looking to reduce impact and make a difference, labs are surprisingly low hanging fruits. In recent years, scientists have become increasingly aware of the disproportionate environmental footprint of the life sciences industry. The statistics of laboratory energy and plastic use are staggering, with laboratories consuming 10 times more energy and 4 times more water than a commercial office space and producing an estimated 5.5 million metric tonnes of plastic waste annually (2% of global plastic waste).
In the session Carlo put forward these questions on each of the three environmental issues, and discussed the feedback from the audience with James and Kerstin:
- What are the main drivers of environmental impact in a lab?
- What are the main solutions and best practices in addressing in the lab this environmental issue?
- What are the challenges that you see in implementing these solutions?
The replies from the attendees were absolutely relevant, and provided some interesting insights, from using more energy efficient equipment in the lab, running a periodic maintenance, invest on the use of reused water for non-potable uses, to more generally closing the loop of water use, improving internal waste management practices, training and workers awareness. But the keywords displayed most in the plenary big screen were not surprisingly in the end: a different mindset, combined with behavioural change.
