Replies

• Maxine Clarke

  02 June 2008 | 06:48

  There was a small conversation about this topic recently at Critical Zone, Nick Wiggington’s Nature Network blog, taking off from the Science paper to which you link above. Title of post: Science is helping slowly kill the planet. (!)

• Neil Saunders

  03 June 2008 | 01:27

  It would be interesting to obtain some hard data on the “ecological footprint” of science-related activity. When I look around universities, I see a lot of machinery that’s switched on 24/7 and molecular biology seems to consume an awful lot of plastic. I’d like to know what this all adds up to in global terms.

• David Whitlock

  03 June 2008 | 02:57

  Plastic is not the environmentally terrible material that many believe it to be. Some plastics are bad when incinerated improperly (such as PVC burned at low temperature in a barrel with copper which catalyzes dioxin formation or any kind of PTFE which makes HF). The plastics used in most disposable lab supplies, polystyrene and polyolefins, are pretty much biologically inert. Not good if ingested by animals, but otherwise inert. If disposed of properly (as all responsible scientists will ensure) there is very little environmental impact other than CO2 release during manufacture, shipping and disposal. Shipping could well be the largest fraction, if it comes by air and has wood based packaging materials and the waste is landfilled and not incinerated. If heat or electricity is generated during the incineration that may displace other fuels.

  Reusing plastic material requires labor, space for storage of dirty material, takes heat for hot water, generate waste water, heat for autoclaving. Depending on what you are doing that may (or may not) have a greater environmental impact that single use. If you have to repeat an experiment because of contamination, there is no savings. For what I do, trace NO/NOx measurements, the chance of contamination is too great.

  What is most important is CO2 emission. Wood products are a lot worse than is plastic. When a tree is cut down, most of the carbon in that tree immediately goes up as CO2 as the roots, twigs, bark, and leaves decompose. When a forest is harvested, there is an immediate CO2 release that doesn’t get “paid back” for a century or more (depending on the age of the forest). If it is an old growth forest that debt may never get paid back. Even structural wood products don’t last forever, and when they are recycled, land filled or incinerated, their carbon goes up as CO2. Wood is not the environmentally benign material that people think it is.

  (competing interest) I work for a cement company doing global warming mitigation research (my day job, while I do my NO research in my spare time at night and on weekends). Cement production is a high CO2 emitter, because it is made from CaCO3 and a ~1 ton of CO2 is emitted per ton of cement produced. We have an active program in CO2 sequestration. A large part of our business is recycling flyash by removing carbon (my contribution). That low carbon flyash is pozzolanic (forms cementitious material on reaction with lime) and can be used to replace some of the cement in concrete on a one for one basis.

• Craig Rowell

  03 June 2008 | 04:31

  First. . .
  Thanks Maxine, Neil and David, I figured there were several people on NN who may already be discussing this and your links are very helpful.

  Next…

  I think the “hard data” on carbon footprints for a reasearch University vs. a primarily teaching University might be an interesting comparison (wiht all the correct caveats, of course).

  Do your labs work on the recommendations in the Science article (i.e. lights, water, turning-off unused equipment, etc.)? I know that mine don’t.

  Since reading those aricles I have been paying attention to my day-to-day activities and today I dialed-down the lights in the lab (no one seemed to notice!).

  Finally. . .

  There are certainly trade-offs to using equipment that can be reused (i.e. glass beakers and pipettes) vs. disposable pipettes. But these should be conscious desicions and not just rely on the fact that “this is the way the lab does it”. Which leads me to my next question…

• David Whitlock

  03 June 2008 | 13:02

  Craig, you are absolutely correct that such things should be analyzed (in their complexity) and that analysis done consciously; both in the lab and in real life. Because we have always done it this way shouldn’t be a sufficient reason either in the lab or in real life. But change always has costs, the mental cost of figuring out what to change to, the implementation cost as the new procedures are adopted.

  This is not being done (for the most part), the analyses being promoted (marketed) are made by parties with economic interests at stake and there is clear bias. The paper vs. plastic bags is a good example. The many advantages of plastic and the many disadvantages of paper are ignored.

  A comparison I am familiar with is the wood vs. other building materials. Every analysis of wood that I have seen, starts with a green field, grows a forest (sequestering CO2), harvests the forest releasing CO2 and obtaining wood. That process takes ~50 to 100 years. The decision to use wood today doesn’t cause the growth of that wood, that wood has already been grown and is in inventory as a standing stock of living trees. Using wood causes living trees to be cut down and releases CO2 from the decomposition of the unusable bits. Using wood causes a net release of CO2.

  Producing cement (as the company I work for does) causes the release of CO2. But that CO2 was once trapped from the atmosphere when the carbonate minerals and coal were formed millions of years ago. The analogy with wood is exactly the same, just the time scales are different.

  Any realistic analysis of CO2 footprint has to take into account the actual timing of that CO2 release. It isn’t the instantaneous CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that is the problem, it is the CO2 concentration over time, and the integrated greenhouse effect of that CO2. CO2 release today is worse than CO2 release in the future. Unless policy takes that into account, the policies will be inefficient (and likely will be ineffective).

  I don’t think that comparing research universities vs. teaching universities is a useful comparison (the only way to “teach” how to do research is to do it). Research is a small part of what is driving global warming.

  There is a blog by someone who calls himself no impact man. A lot of what he is doing is “touchy-feely” organic-type stuff and not strictly environmental impact. The entire population could not live the way that he does.

• Morgan Jones

  03 June 2008 | 14:23

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