Certifying Sustainable Practices

by Jacob DeNobel

When graduate research assistant Ryan Weeks brought the My Green Lab sustainability certification program to the lab of Johns Hopkins Professor Marc Ostermeier, he was shocked by how much energy was saved with minor adjustments to lab procedures.

Per the program’s recommendations, the lab turned off and unplugged equipment at night, ordered from local suppliers, and fixed leaks in their vaults. Raising the specimen freezer’s temperatures by just 10 degrees, to the still-safe –70 degrees Celsius, led to a 30% energy reduction. Now Weeks, along with teaching lab coordinator Christine Duke and energy engineer Bena Zeng, want to bring the environmental certification process to the whole university. Recognized by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, the American Energy Society, and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories, the My Green Lab certification program has become the global benchmark for measuring the environmental impact of laboratory practices, Weeks said. According to Duke, the idea to apply for My Green Lab certification developed as INBT renewed their Green Office Certification. She wondered if there was a similar program that analyzed individual labs. Zeng, who works in the Johns Hopkins Office of Sustainability, brought the My Green Lab program to Duke’s attention. In the end, Weeks signed on with the Ostermeier lab, while Duke spearheaded the program in the lab of the institute’s director, Sharon Gerecht.

With the success of the Ostermeier and Gerecht labs’ certifications, Duke, Weeks, and Zeng launched a pilot program to help other Hopkins’ labs through the certification process. Weeks hopes that the first cohort will show labs and the Hopkins administration that certification is not only good for the environment but a financially responsible decision. “If we save energy across all the labs, that’s going to translate into money savings,” Weeks said. “That translates into labs having more money to do the research that they need to do. This is sustainable not only from an environmental perspective but also from a self-sustaining perspective.”