Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of research laboratory protocols

医学研究实验室传统上专注于对医学新发现进行最好的科学研究。然而，我们现在都意识到气候变化和日常生活中其他环境方面的重要性，如废物管理、污染、一次性塑料的问题等。研究实验室使用大量塑料物品(例如个人防护用品、手套、设备等)，我们知道实验室塑料处理约占全球塑料废物的2%。我们还知道，有了新的知识和测量方法，以及实践中的一些改变，我们可以极大地减少此类材料和能源的消耗，使我们的科学发现更加环保。癌症研究所(ICR)最近所做的工作表明，它们的大部分环境和碳足迹是由实验室中进行的工作造成的(而不是从通勤到那里工作或在建筑物内供暖或照明)。因此，我们的项目是世界著名的癌症研究所和附近萨里大学的环境与可持续发展中心共同努力的结果，目的是仔细测量ICR几个实验室程序的环境足迹，并与他们的科学家一起重新设计或调整它们，使它们更“可持续”--而不损害科学的质量。这是一个开创性的项目，因为我们的环境影响评估(LCA)的‘黄金标准’在这类研究中只被很少使用。毫无疑问，这是获得真实的、有意义的数据的最佳方法，这将有助于指导科学足迹的改进，除了衡量我们目前所做的工作，我们还将测试执行这些实验室程序的新方法，并衡量改进。我们相信，高质量的环境数据将受到ICR科学家的高度尊重(而且范围更广)，并将有助于将有价值的创新带入我们进行未来新的、更可持续的医学发现的方式中。

Medical research laboratories have traditionally concentrated on carrying out the best scientific research for newdiscoveries in medicine. However, we are all aware now of the importance of Climate Change and other environmental aspects of daily life like waste management, pollution, problems with single use plastics etc. Research laboratories use a lot of plastic items (e.g. PPE, gloves, equipment etc) and we know that laboratory plastics disposal makes up about 2 % of all plastics waste globally. We also know that with new knowledge and measurements, and some changes in practices, we can greatly reduce such material and energy consumptions, making our science discoveries much more environmentally friendly. Work done very recently by the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) shows that most of their environmental and carbon footprints are caused by the work that goes on in the laboratories (rather than from commuting to work there or for heating or lighting in its buildings).Our project is a joint effort therefore by the world renowned ICR and the Centre for Environment & Sustainability at the nearby University of Surrey to carefully measure the environmental footprint of several laboratory procedures at the ICR and, with their scientists, to re-design or adapt them to make them more 'sustainable' - without compromising the quality of the science. This is a ground-breaking project as our 'gold standard' for environmental impact assessment (known as LCA) has only been used very little on such studies. It is undoubtedly the best approach to get real, meaningful data that will help guide the improvements to the science footprint and, as well as measuring what we do presently, we will also be testing out new ways of doing these lab procedures and measuring the improvements.We are sure that high quality environmental data will be highly respected by the scientists at ICR (and much more widely) and will help to bring valuable innovation into the ways we go about making the new, and more sustainable, medical discoveries of the future.