Making Cancer Research Green: Our Journey to Lab Sustainability

Pour le francais, cliquez ici.

With our Eco Award program, we ask award recipients to share about the work they’re doing to make Ottawa more sustainable. Carole Doré, recipient of the Refuse–Reduce–Reuse Champion Award, kindly agreed to share about the impactful and inspiring work that she’s doing at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. Please enjoy!

A few years ago, the director of the OHRI Cancer Centre, Dr. Rebecca Auer (now the CEO of OHRI), tasked us with making our research greener. As a scientific research group, with the ultimate goal of improving patients’ lives, we believe we have a unique role to play in reducing waste and energy consumption.

Unfortunately, with many biomedical research experiments requiring single-use plastics, with no realistic alternatives, biomedical labs produce an estimated 2% of global plastic waste per year. In addressing Dr. Auer’s desire to lessen our environmental impact, we met the challenge of how we could make our own research labs more sustainable head on, with a focus on both the use of laboratory consumables and energy.

Our first step was to create a Green Team to brainstorm alternatives for materials and ways to reduce energy and water consumption. A valuable resource in this effort was the non-profit organization My Green Lab, which provides support for labs aiming to improve their environmental stewardship.

Smart Energy Management

Laboratory equipment is the lifeblood of cancer research, but it’s also a major energy consumer. Everything—from -80°C freezers to centrifuges and heating blocks—demands constant power.

Here are the changes we made to reduce our energy use:

• Freezer Temperature Optimization: We adjusted our -80°C freezers to operate at -70°C. This small change had no negative impact on the long-term viability of our stored samples and saves the energy equivalent of 11 households worth of energy a day!
• Optimizing Equipment Use: Many common pieces of equipment are habitually left on when not in use. This can be the result of the warm-up time required for some instruments, such as heat blocks. With the use of automatic timers we have significantly reduced the electricity used by common devices without impacting the efficiency of our work.
• Water-Saving Autoclaves: Autoclaves, used daily for sterilization, can use an extreme amount of water (approximately 200 liters per minute). We adopted a new system that reduces the quantity of materials needing sterilization, which in turn reduces both our water and energy consumption.

Reducing Our Plastic and Shipping Footprint

As mentioned above, biomedical research labs are notoriously reliant on single-use plastics, often generating several tons of plastic waste annually. The need for these materials comes not only for their sterility, but also for the convenience of off-the-shelf readiness. We implemented a robust “Reduce, Reuse, and ‘Recycle’” strategy to minimize both our plastic waste and the amount of material shipped to our facility.

 Reduce

• In-House Reagent Fabrication: Instead of purchasing pre-made solutions that come with excessive plastic packaging in small unit sizes, we now make many solutions ourselves. This drastically cuts down on plastic bottles and packaging waste. 
• Buying Concentrates and in Bulk: Ordering reagents in larger, concentrated formats reduces the total number of plastic containers and the mass of the materials shipped. For just one single buffer that we used to purchase, we've eliminated over 600 pounds of plastic bottles a year and nearly 2 metric tonnes of liquid.
• Different Packaging: Our research requires the frequent use of disposable plastic pipet tips, used to handle precise volumes of sterile liquids. We switched from using a pre-packaged pipet tip box to a restockable pipet tip system. This change has reduced our plastic waste by more than 400 pounds a year and has greatly decreased our carbon footprint, as the product now ships to the lab three times a year versus monthly.

Reuse and Alternative Materials

• Switching to Glassware: Many research labs rely on single-use plastic serological pipettes, while now we have transitioned glass serological pipettes that can be washed, autoclaved, and reused hundreds of times. Again, this not only reduces plastic waste but also shipping materials and our carbon footprint.

"Recycle"

• Recycling is difficult in a biomedical research lab because many of our consumables come into contact with biological materials. Therefore, we incinerate our waste instead of traditional recycling.* Waste containers are collected daily and transported to an incineration plant where their safe destruction generates useable energy.

Minimizing Our Carbon Footprint

Often, small changes can have a big impact with little to no effort. For example, we used to purchase our consumable materials on a monthly basis, but by working with our suppliers and acquiring additional storage space, we have been able to drastically reduce our individual shipments: from 245 shipments in 2021 to only 61 shipments in 2024!

By focusing on simple, high-impact changes—like setting timers on equipment, optimizing freezer temperatures, and adopting a “Reduce-Reuse-Recycle” philosophy for plastic consumables—we’re proving that the future of cancer research can be both groundbreaking and more sustainable. Importantly, our collective actions also save institutional money while at the same time solidify the role of researchers in fostering a healthier world for everybody.