Environmental impacts of laboratory and scientific equipment: Focus on equipment operation and procurement

Climate change and environmental sustainability are major priorities across scientific and policy domains. Scientists themselves are starting to recognize that their own activities have direct and indirect environmental impacts. These impacts result from things like material and energy use and waste generation in conducting scientific research, particularly in laboratories. In this article, we build upon growing efforts to measure and manage these environmental impacts by conducting cradle-to-grave life cycle assessments (LCAs) of widely used scientific and laboratory equipment. We considered over 3000 pieces of equipment used by Government of Canada laboratories. Our study contributes in four ways. First, although previous work has examined laboratory consumables and other impact drivers like building energy consumption and transportation, our study draws attention to the environmental impacts of laboratory and scientific equipment. Second, our study demonstrates a novel approach for screening large and varied sets of equipment to prioritize equipment with the highest potential environmental impacts. Third, our study broadens the scope of assessment with respect to system boundaries (i.e., cradle-to-grave) and environmental impacts (i.e., beyond GHG emissions). Finally, our study connects equipment-level LCA results to sustainability transformations by highlighting leverage points informed by the life cycle profile of equipment. Our results suggest a tendency for laboratory and scientific equipment to be use-intensive (as seen, e.g., in the case of refrigerators and freezers where the use stage accounts for approximately 97% of life cycle GHG emissions). However, this life cycle profile varies across environmental indicators (e.g., climate change, acidification, smog formation, and ecological toxicity) and with changes in equipment usage frequency (i.e., hours per year in operation). Some equipment, like scanning electron microscopes, can be production-intensive. These findings suggest that sustainability transformations for laboratory equipment need to consider the life cycle profile of the equipment and involve leverage points beyond procurement decisions.