Personal Note from Patrick, the Editor

Hi Reader, can you work more sustainably if you have validated procedures?

Nobody who works in a regulated setting or follows a decade-old protocol wants to rework what has already been established.

However, I think a few false assumptions hold people back far more than they should.

Let me walk through a few places where I would drive change without much effort:

Today's Lesson: Handling Regulation

How to drive change without reworking SOPs & protocols.

Number of the Day

A staggering $22 000 - this is how much money can be saved by closing fume hoods (and biosafety cabinets) when they are not needed. This figure was achieved with just 225 hoods. Similarly, using a P1000 instead of a 5 mL serological pipette can reduce plastic waste by 90.5%. If every scientist did this once a month, we would save about
670 000 kg of plastic waste a year. Changes like these are not affected by any regulations and can still have a huge effect. And there is much more!

22 000

Change Despite Regulation

I feel your concerns. Scientific processes are fragile. If you change a step in your protocol, will it still work?

Do you have to go through your page-long SOP/protocol and then wait weeks for potential approval?

We start optimization by focusing on how we handle the items we use every day. In other words, we start with the how, not the what. Changes to protocol-defined procedures or fundamental research strategies come much further down the line.

However, in my experience, you often don’t even need to go that far to enable significant savings.

In other words, dispel the belief that you must fundamentally change processes to enable meaningful change.

Let’s look at a few concrete examples to outline what I am referring to:

Focus on the Solution, Not the Problem

Kilograms of plastic waste and >$100,000 in electricity costs have been saved with fairly simple changes.

According to their own statements, AstraZeneca saved about $10,000 annually simply by realizing that sample preparation often took longer than the startup time of their two fusion fluxers. These changes do not require you to change anything related to the guidelines or laws that apply to labs.

Take a normal, everyday step from your protocol. It might read something like this:

“Centrifuge the sample at 300 × g for 10 minutes at 4 °C, discard the supernatant, and add 2 mL of buffer to the pellet without dissolving it.”

That is a fully defined spin, and yet it leaves a lot of possibilities for savings open.

For instance, whether you run it in a 15 mL or a 50 mL tube is up to you—allowing you to save >50% of the plastic waste.
Furthermore, you could opt for biobased plastics that meet the exact same standards as conventional plastics but are not made from fossil fuels.
Finally, you can use a P1000 pipette tip for the buffer instead of a 2 mL or 5 mL serological pipette.

Of note, you don’t want to play around with factors like spin time early on. First, because the energy savings are very limited.

Second, this is where you need to revalidate that your protocol actually works well.

Knowing Where to Start

What about pharmacopoeial monographs and regulated analytical methods?

They are real constraints and we will cover how to deal with those soon.

But your first priority should be to rule out whether there is anything else that is just as impactful and still easier to do.

First, in R&D settings, you normally have much less regulation. Start there, savings are often larger than you think.

Second, when you are setting up new methods for the first time, you have a lot of leverage:

Imagine you want to detect a new compound using HPLC-MS. Testing whether you really need high LC resolution might allow you to use shorter columns, cutting eluent and energy use by 30–70%.

While the chromatogram looks similar, you can save a significant amount of eluent by choosing columns with a smaller diameter. The same applies to shorter columns. In our example, where the method is coupled with MS, you will investigate the peak of interest in more detail anyway. The graph above comes from this fantastic blog post.

If you work with microscopes, reviewing how many samples you can place on a slide is incredibly simple but can save hundreds of slides a year.

Again, changing such “habits” is hard and will be met with doubt. Establish them early on, and everybody will follow.

No Regulation, Less Headache

And then there are areas where no regulation applies in the first place.

They might extend beyond your own experiments but are worth considering.

Consumables.
Pipette-tip systems with refill formats or antibodies/enzymes delivered at room temperature do not change anything about your workflow.

If you’d like to learn more about these options, here are the biobased tubes (research-grade quality and autoclavable), and here is the Labcon Eclipse Refill system, which, as far as I know, was the very first refill system available and is still the lightest one on the market - saving you over 30kg of plastic waste per year (9 tons for your institute) if we assume you use 9 tip boxes a week.

Procurement Practices.
You can order less often, consolidate where you order from, and choose products that come with less packaging. None of this touches a single method.

Internal Organization.
I know everybody hates these topics, but how well you maintain your instruments and freezers has a big impact on their longevity. Similarly, do you have a central list where you track where chemicals and reagents are stored? If not, how many get lost, how many expire, and how much time does that steal from you if experiments have to stop or you spend an hour searching for AlCl3?

Applying the Knowledge

Do you notice that we didn’t mention setting freezers to -70 °C or how to revalidate protocols?

Because starting with changes that include regulated steps is often not necessary at all. Even in BSL-2 environments I could drive change without affecting time-sensitive protocols.

My main tip is not to let yourself be deterred - neither by your own assumption that something is not allowed nor by a colleague raising a doubt.

Go and read the actual regulation, standard, or requirement before you conclude anything.

And even if there are constraints, you might still have room to play.

Air changes in the lab are a good example because there is usually a minimum ventilation rate - often eight air changes per hour.

A major challenge is that many people simply don’t know where the biggest savings can be made. For instance, HVAC frequently accounts for about 50% of a laboratory’s total energy use, and optimization can often reduce that consumption by 30–40%. Yet, who ever thinks about how a fume hood or A/C works...

However, that minimum is often exceeded by a wide margin in practice.

If your lab is running at 13, you have real room to bring it down and still stay fully compliant.

Once you allow yourself to stop thinking only about the problems and separate what is genuinely prescribed from what has simply become habit, you almost always find there is more you can do.

How We Feel Today

References

Penndorf, P., 2024. Reducing plastic waste in scientific protocols by 65% – practical steps for sustainable research. FEBS Letters, 598(11), 1331–1334. doi:10.1002/1873-3468.14909.

If you have a wish or a question, feel free to reply to this Email.

Otherwise, wish you a beautiful week!
See you again on the 3rd : )

Edited by Patrick Penndorf
Connection@ReAdvance.com
Lutherstraße 159, 07743, Jena, Thuringia, Germany
Data Protection & Impressum

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Green Education – Avoiding the Struggle with Regulation