R&D is often considered an area where sustainable practices clash with working practices. Globally, laboratories are resource intensive spaces, producing millions of tonnes of plastic waste each year and using up to 4x water and 10x energy as a standard office building.
But across the world, many laboratories are changing their approach. Moa has partnered with the nonprofit organisation My Green Lab to help us reduce our environmental footprint. MyGreen Lab certification has been recognised as the gold standard in lab sustainability best practices. and was cited by the United Nations Race to Zero campaign as a key measure of progress towards a achieving net zero by 2050,
On 22nd April 2024 (Earth Day!), Moa’s cross-functional, multi-site Green team was formed, and our first task was completing a baseline survey with My Green Lab. We discovered we were already ahead of the curve in some respects, scoring 45% (equivalent to a bronze certification), as well as identifying multiple areas for potential improvement.
From this baseline report, the Green Team began setting goals for where we could improve. Our first step was to identify seven sustainability priorities to focus on, from the 19 different areas covered by MyGreenLab:
- Green chemistry
- Utilities
- Recycling & waste reduction
- Resource management
- Communication
- Large equipment
- Travel
Each member of the team chose one to research. We then pooled our information and put into place a plan to improve by the time of our MyGreenLab certification in October 2024. We also identified areas where we had good sustainability practices in place, such as our resource management, and raised awareness of these in an internal newsletter.
Over the next few months, our Green team worked on sustainability projects across the company. In our Bellhouse building, we continued our partnership with My Green Lab by completing the 2024 Freezer Challenge. We defrosted or de-iced all freezers in the lab, resulting in estimated savings of 24.15kWh a day – enough to power an average UK home for 3 days!
At Moa, we are very passionate about reducing waste, so over the summer we piloted LabCycle’s groundbreaking circular economy recycling programme in one of our labs. Over three months, we diverted 45kg of plastic lab waste from incineration, which has been recycled into new lab consumables. Now, we’re evaluating whether we can roll this programme out to all of our labs, potentially saving up to 1270kg of plastic lab waste from incineration each year.
No lab is complete without its equipment, but often pieces of equipment might be left on unnecessarily, consuming power. As a team we consulted the users of each lab to determine which pieces of equipment could safely be switched off, and then made labels to help colleagues identify where they can save energy by turning equipment off when they’re finished using it.
These efforts, and many more, resulted in Moa’s Bellhouse lab being certified as a Gold level lab in October 2024. Even better, we have made sure that the lessons we learned from the process are being applied across the whole company, saving energy and reducing waste across all our sites.
So, what’s next for the Green Team? We’re now looking at how we can improve sustainable travel options to work, evaluating our carbon footprint as a company, and investigating glove recycling programmes to reduce our waste further.