As we built back lab sustainability efforts after the pandemic, we struggled to find the same level of engagement with new lab users. The small group of previously invested participants, mostly principal investigators (PIs) and professors, remained – but to expand our programmes, we needed a bigger audience.
We envisaged a network of stakeholders at all levels, from technicians to PIs. This would help us better understand motivations and barriers around greener lab practices.
- Spotlight guide: Greener lab practices in higher education
- Greener labs don’t need bigger budgets – just better habits
- Campus Talks podcast: Actions that make a real difference in the fight against climate change
Moving beyond a service-provider model
At Energy and Climate Action, our programmes target energy and water use, greenhouse gases and waste. Some examples of our Green Labs programmes include:
- Shut the Sash guidelines for fume hoods
- Campus as a Living Lab research grants
- Green Spaces Certifications
- energy-efficiency rebates for lab equipment.
In programmes that didn’t involve labs, we were the experts. But we needed to change how we interacted with labs, so that knowledge could flow both ways. Our engagement would benefit from a new approach to help us understand, for example, how the needs of a biosafety level 2 medical lab differed from a chemistry teaching lab. If our interaction with them was limited to the Shut the Sash campaign, we would know they both had fume hoods, but we would have no deeper understanding than that. We also needed to identify key stakeholders who could ensure buy-in.
Creating the Green Labs Network
We decided to treat engagement with labs as a programme unto itself. We knew from experience that people opt out of sustainability conversations because:
- they do not think of their work as “environmental”
- they do not feel they have enough sustainability expertise to participate.
So, we aimed to create a strategy to engage lab users by:
- creating multiple avenues of engagement with different levels of commitment
- framing knowledge exchange as a two-way street
- avoiding engagement for engagement’s sake, with a tangible result every time we interacted with network members
- building outwards from established connections to find sustainability champions in all relevant areas.
We started the Green Labs Network with a regular newsletter that contained only information relevant to Green Labs. The next stage was consultation. At the first meeting, attendees told us that their priorities were equipment redistribution, connection between labs, and single-use plastic waste. Shortly afterwards, we launched a Google Chat; one of the primary ways people have come to use it is to coordinate equipment sharing.
We are working on the third phase of the project: partnership mapping. Our goal is to create a database that captures the connections among labs and administrations. We want to know who we have, and have not, worked with to better promote our programmes, as well as who to consult when developing new programmes. Our long-term goal is to establish working groups of key stakeholders for new and ongoing projects.
Boosting interest and expertise in sustainable labs
The Green Labs Network chat has grown to more than 85 members, with almost 450 subscribers to the newsletter. We have established a formal partnership with our Health, Safety and Environment office to leverage their connection with labs and align our programming with their work onboarding, inspecting and closing out labs. Our partnership mapping led us to develop new connections across campus, leading to opportunities such as a large-scale Shut the Sash roll-out in the Faculty of Engineering and aligning equipment redistribution processes between faculties.
At the second annual network meeting in June, we consulted with lab users on proposed changes to three programmes, which will inform our work for the year to come.
Whenever we work with labs, we meet people who are passionate about their work and keenly aware of its environmental impact. Our goal with the Green Labs Network is to connect lab community members, share solutions and foster a community working together to reduce our collective environmental impact.
Justis Allard-Hagan is programme coordinator of Energy and Climate Action at the University of Alberta, Canada.
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