Can We Reduce Our Impact on the Environment?

Have you ever stopped to think about how much potential recycling a typical researcher creates over the course of a day? Learn more in this video.

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Hey, you! You there, in the lab coat and goggles. Have you ever stopped to think about how much potential recycling a typical researcher creates over the course of a day?  What about how much energy a roomful of minus 80 freezers use?

You’re not alone…There are so many things competing for your attention when you’re at the lab bench, it’s easy to understand why you haven’t noticed how many petri dishes or microcentrifuge tubes you’ve tossed out.

Did you know that around 32 million tons of plastic waste were generated last year, in the U.S. alone? While we can’t say for sure how much of that was generated by life scientists engaged in research, we can say that we definitely share some of the responsibility!

We know that scientists use these tools to make discoveries, cure diseases, and solve mysteries, but all of these tasks create byproducts that could be recycled.

Spread over a lab, a department, a university, a city… state… country… you can see how quickly it adds up.

Sure, there are some things that are out of our hands, but let’s do what we can.

Here at NEB, we are always looking at ways to help reduce our impact on the environment. We are proud to sponsor Labconscious, an open community for researchers to share their ideas on how to reduce the footprint of bench science.

We also carefully designed our Monarch Nucleic Acid Purification Kits so that they use less plastic and are packaged using responsibly-sourced, recyclable materials. We encourage you to share your suggestions at labconscious.com, so that we can all benefit from each other’s ideas, big or small.

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