The Pitt Green Spotlight is a monthly series highlighting Pitt’s Green Offices & Labs! Each post highlights Pitt Green Offices and/or Labs, sharing their experiences implementing sustainable practices, tips and tricks, lessons learned, and opportunities for more sustainable work at Pitt.

We hope these Green Offices & Labs will inspire you to try out new sustainable practices in your own workspace! Want to be included in our next highlight? Contact us.

Pitt Green Lab Spotlight: Fullerton Lab of Nanoionics and Electronics
Swanson School of Engineering, Benedum Hall

What does your lab study? What kind of space, equipment, and/or materials do you work with?

The Fullerton Lab (a.k.a. the Nanoionics and Electronics Lab) studies electrolytes (ions) to explore next-generation semiconductor materials and create novel electronic devices.

Our research is centered around nanodevice fabrication and characterization, which needs equipment such as various microscopes, a glovebox for electrolyte synthesis and deposition, and mechanical probe stations for electrical measurements. We use a lot of semiconductor materials for our electrolytes (i.e., silicon wafers and polymers).      

Why did you want to become a Pitt Green Lab? What inspired you to look into ways to make your lab more sustainable?

I attended a seminar given by Penn State Professor John Paul Maria titled “The Cost of Science” that really resonated with me. The idea was that academic research activities incur a large environmental cost that is often overlooked as “the cost of science” — and that cost was much more than people realize.

Bottom line is that academic research should not be considered exempt from sustainable practices, and high-quality research and sustainability can be in alignment. I brought this up at a group meeting shortly after and another Fullerton Lab member, Priscilla Prem, had just heard about the Pitt Green Lab initiative, which I felt strongly we should join.

Are there any simple changes or sustainability hacks you’d recommend other labs make to be more sustainable? 

We work at the nanoscale, so our material usage is relatively minimal. I realize that it isn’t always possible or practical to scale down experiments, but it’s still a good guiding principle.

We did notice that we were going through a lot of disposable gloves — and since we don’t use any biohazardous materials (and few toxic chemicals), there was an opportunity to reuse or recycle gloves. We have recently started to use reusable gloves (just a bit thicker material than the disposable kind) that can be cleaned for reuse — and we are keeping tabs on the Pitt Sustainability glove recycling program in development. We also recommend purchasing through the Dietrich Stock Room as much as possible to reduce packaging waste and emissions from shipping (it’s usually cheaper also!)

What are some opportunities you see to be more sustainable in the lab?

From our assessment of waste streams for the Pitt Green Lab survey, we realized that our largest waste stream by far was cooling water for our Close Cycle Refrigeration (CCR) unit, which protects our superconducting magnet. Our CCR requires a minimum flow rate of 2 gallons/minute of cooling water, so we use ~20,000 gallons of water for one week of use (we usually use it 1 week per month). We are now actively exploring the purchase of a water chiller to recirculate our cooling water.

Anything else you’d like to share regarding sustainability in the lab or on campus?

I think there are lots of opportunities to improve lab sustainability at Pitt through shared lab resources. For example, if multiple labs were in our situation of needing cooling water intermittently, it might make sense to jointly purchase a water chiller that could be shared (or one could already be available for a loan).

Resource sharing does not have to be limited to equipment/materials and can also include sustainability ideas or tips. By increasing resource sharing and communication between labs, a Pitt Green Lab community can start to take shape, collectively making a much greater impact at Pitt.

Pitt Green Office Spotlight:
Student Affairs – University of Pittsburgh at Bradford

The Office of Student Affairs is the first Green Office at UPB! What are some unique things you and UPB are doing to be more sustainable?

In addition to having the University’s largest solar array on top of our new George B. Duke Engineering and Information Technologies Building, Pitt-Bradford is highly sustainability-conscious, from our leadership on down. A lot of that is driven by our sense of place in the wilds of Pennsylvania, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of protected forest and recreational opportunities. We have zero sort or single-stream recycling on campus and in each of our residence hall rooms we provide recycle bins for our students. Metz Dining, our foodservice partner, has instituted an educational station aimed at reducing food wasted, where all discarded food is separated from paper products and weighed instantaneously, so students can learn how much food is wasted, both on an individual and a campus-wide level.

Why did you want to become a Green Office? What inspired you to look into ways to make your office more sustainable?

We felt an ethical and educational responsibility to model for our students well-being in the environmental sphere of life – a respect of and commitment to protecting the environment that we benefit from every day. If our job is to educate and inspire right action within our campus community, we thought what better way than to follow the steps to ensure we are doing that for all to see and setting an example to follow.

Are there any sustainability “hacks” or simple changes you’d recommend other offices like yours make to be more sustainable?

The biggest “hack” for us was stopping everything we were doing for a day to dig through the closets and cabinets, determine what supplies we had and what we really needed, and put the rest out for others on campus to come and take in a “rummage sale.” Hopefully, it prevented some offices from purchasing supplies that we already had, it allowed us to promote the reuse of items on campus and through donating, and psychologically it improved our workspace by having less clutter and more organization.

Another simple change was through our SGA – who funds the majority of student activities on campus. In their budget review process, they started to scrutinize requests based on some set criteria, including sustainability. If you were frequently requesting money for single-use plastic and paper products or single-use plastic water bottles, they were really encouraging groups to consider using reusable items from our dining services or providing other means of serving food at events.

What are some opportunities you see to be more sustainable in your office, and/or on campus?

Getting our building management systems under control, primarily our heating and air conditioning systems. Right now, they’re old and struggling to meet our needs in a sustainable way during times of increased heat waves and colder cold days. On a more individual level, I think we still have room to grow in terms of our knowledge of and commitment to simple sustainable practices like recycling and limiting the purchase and use of single-use plastics and products for events and meetings.

I love to frame sustainability efforts, both individually and collectively, in terms of how it contributes to well-being, to our ability to flourish as a community and a campus. I think that’s where we’ll focus in our messaging and educational efforts with students and the rest of our campus as we understand and promote the idea that we’re all connected through our environment and have a responsibility to ourselves and future generations to protect and preserve it.