Meet Gabi, our ESG Champion

 

As an environmentally conscious environmental testing lab (easy for us to say), we are focused on becoming more environmentally responsible. Progress to date has been achieved in no small part through the work of our appointed ESG Champion, Gabriela Iacob, who has driven a ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ attitude to how we do things onsite.

It made sense to begin with focusing on efforts to reduce the amount of waste we produce; better not to have to reuse or recycle something that was not necessary to use in the first place!

 We’ve made fantastic progress to date:

Reduce 

• We now use refillable cleaning products throughout the site. We colour coded these for each department – leading to some eclectic shopping lists!
• Lighting has been changed throughout the facility to energy efficient LED
• Cold stores now have alarms fitted to ensure the doors are not left open, also helping to preserve sample integrity
• Electric kettles have been replaced in the staff areas with hot water dispensers to the annoyance of staff who have a bigger than average mug
• Paper usage has been reduced as we have moved to more automated and electronic for data processing with the added bonus of fewer transcription errors.

Reuse 

• We have joined a scheme through Sartorius so that our old pipettes can be used for spare parts as opposed to them being fully recycled

 Recycle 

• We are tremendously proud to have joined a plastic recycling programme through Elkay. This has been a real labour of love as there’s high potential for contamination; but through this programme over the last year, we have collected and recycled over 750kg of plastic waste that would otherwise have gone to landfill – an incredible volume!
• We have expanded what we are capable of recycling onsite to include batteries, printer cartridges and even old vapes (this is not an invitation to start sending these in with samples)

 Special Project 

A day was organised (and then reorganised a few times because of terrible weather) to plant a wildflower meadow onsite; providing bees, butterflies and other pollinators with food throughout the year. On a single day in summer, one acre of wildflower meadow can contain 3 million flowers, producing 1 kg of nectar sugar. That’s enough to support nearly 96,000 honeybees per day. We also purchased a birdfeeder to attract more wildlife on site including a variety of birds and a cheeky squirrel or two.