Team:UCL/Sustainability
Little LEAF
What is little LEAF?
Little LEAF is a three step collaborative program that we designed for iGEM teams around the world to follow to learn about sustainable practices in the lab, as well as take action to minimize the environmental impact of their projects throughout the course of iGEM. We built upon the Dresden 2017 iGEM team and Boston 2018 iGEM team’s sustainability initiatives. Little LEAF was also developed in collaboration with and inspired by LEAF, the Lab Efficiency Assessment Framework.
Why are we doing this?
We believe we are in a critical period in the earth’s history, in which our actions can have a momentous impact for following generations (see educated experts speak passionately on the subject here, here, and here). We have been inspired and alarmed by local London climate protests, young activists such as Greta Thunberg, and the UK Parliament’s formal announcement in May that we are in a global climate and environmental emergency. Therefore this year our team sought to incorporate sustainable practices and environmental awareness into our project. Importantly we want to emphasize that although our iGEM project is not directly actively addressing climate change, we think environmental awareness and action should be incorporated into every aspect of our lives and any areas of research.
Who can participate?
We invite any 2019 iGEM team to read through our three step plan (see below), and complete as many aspects as they can and document them on their wiki! Any small step is a meaningful step!
When does the challenge start?
We are launched the challenge the week of the 1st of July to coincide with London Climate Action Week. We encouraged teams to participate throughout the summer, and present their findings on their wiki and at the Giant Jamboree.
How does it work?
Step 1: Sustainability now: The Emerald Lab Checklist
We were extremely lucky to be in a university that already takes action on sustainability, so we contacted and met Martin Farley from GreenUCL in the beginning of June. He gave us a small talk and we were inspired by his tips on how to make lab work more sustainable. We then found Dresden 2017’s comprehensive guide and decided to synthesize it down (while adding a couple of our own tips) to a checklist of the most impactful direct actions researchers can take. We've created therefore a miniguide available here, and photo checklist available here. Let us know when your team has completed the miniguide by ticking our online checklist available here!
As your team completes simple sustainable tasks listed on the checklist, post them to any of your team's social media platforms with the appropriate hashtag!
Step 2: Future Sustainability: Reuse, Reduce + Recycle in the lab: a complete your leftover materials handover sheet for next year’s team
One of the things we realized was the amount of left-over material there can be after a full summer in the lab. Freezers can easily get clogged up, unfinished miniprep kits forgotten about, and old unused pipette tips, falcon tubes, and other plastic wear discarded without even being used. We have created a worksheet, available below, that teams can complete and pass down to the future team at their institution. This will hopefully help minimise wasted materials at the end of a project. Oxford's iGEM team helped us brainstorm and create the worksheet below!
Step 3: Record the failures!
Well known to most iGEM teams: the best laid plans often go awry. Even the best ideas, and then planned and carried out experiments can fail. Often these will not be published or shared, except for maybe with immediate colleagues. Resources that are spent on these unshared findings, even though they may be negative findings, are therefore wasted, as nothing stops another researcher from having the same idea. Therefore this year we are encouraging iGEM teams to share their most important failed experiment. Importantly teams should, if they can, determine why the experiment failed, and share the explanation.
Participants
We want to extend a huge thank you to Martin Farley who guided us throughout the development of little LEAF. We would also liek to thank Westminster's iGEM team and Oxford's iGEM team help us develop little LEAF, as well as all the teams who participated! Including: University of Virginia IGEM , Saint Joseph iGEM, Warwick iGEM , Sheffield iGEM University of Edinburgh, Overgraduate team and Cairo University iGEM.
Scroll through the pictures below to see some of the teams completing the emerald challenge!
