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Authors: Alexander Cimprich, Sahand Kasaeipour, Steven B. Young

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.

Source: PLOS Sustainability and Transformation. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000271. Abstract from the publisher’s feed; HTML formatting and repeated author line removed.

Authors: Liam Ó Riada, Unai Pascual, Esther Turnhout, Julia Neidig

Education is considered a key leverage point for sustainability transformation. Yet, dominant human-capital-based discourses, promoted by actors such as the OECD, have long framed education in an economistic way, marginalizing the creative, critical, and transdisciplinary pedagogies required for sustainability. Using the case of Spain, we apply discourse analysis to analyse historically (1975 to the present) how human-capital-based discourses have shaped education policy and where opportunities and constraints for transformative sustainability education (TSE) emerge. The findings reveal three major periods: (1) emancipatory aspirations during Spain’s democratic transition (1975–1990), (2) consolidation of a neoliberal consensus shaped by OECD discourse (1990–2018), and (3) the emergence of discursive openings for TSE (2019–present). While in the last period sustainability has become a central signifier with an education law that legitimises transdisciplinary, experiential and embodied pedagogies, its implementation remains partly constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. The analysis of these discursive shifts reveals key opportunities and barriers for transformative shifts in education systems, showing that while dislocatory events and the linking of different struggles for educational reform can enable the introduction of elements of TSE into policy, the strong persistence of market-oriented logics risks leading to a co-optation of sustainability.

Source: PLOS Sustainability and Transformation. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267. Abstract from the publisher’s feed; HTML formatting and repeated author line removed.

Authors: Kwame Ankomah, David Azanu, Mwema Felix Mwema

Plastic waste poses significant environmental challenges in developing countries such as Ghana, where rapid economic growth, inadequate waste management infrastructure, and the persistence of linear production systems heighten the urgency of transitioning to circular, resource-efficient industrial pathways. This study evaluates the environmental impacts of manufacturing polyethylene carrier bags from recycled plastic waste in Ghana using the life cycle assessment (LCA) approach, in accordance with ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. The analysis considers 100,000 polyethylene carrier bags produced per year as the functional unit, with a total bag weight of 750 kg. The system boundary encompasses the manufacturing phase and includes the upstream environmental burdens of electricity consumption, sodium nitrate, and carbon black production, as captured in the Ecoinvent 3.11 database. Impact assessment was performed using SimaPro 10.2.0.3 and the ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) V1.11/ World (2010) H methodology, covering 18 impact categories. Results showed that electricity consumption, sourced from Ghana’s fossil-intensive national grid (66.4% thermal, 32.9% hydropower, 0.7% renewables), is the dominant contributor to most impact categories, accounting for a global warming potential of 288.9 kg CO2 eq (total GWP is 353.53 kg CO2 eq), 137.2 kg 1,4-DCB eq (total is 264.5 kg 1,4-DCB eq) terrestrial ecotoxicity, and 106.3 kg oil eq (total is 131.3 kg oil eq) fossil resource scarcity. Sodium hydroxide, used in wastewater treatment, is the second-largest contributor to global warming (26.0 kg CO2 eq). Carbon black is the second-largest contributor to fossil resource scarcity (13.7 kg oil eq), while sodium hydroxide and polyaluminium chloride used in wastewater treatment are significant contributors to toxicity categories. A sensitivity analysis comparing Ghana’s electricity grid to a solar tower energy scenario demonstrates that switching to renewable electricity reduces global warming potential by approximately 74%, from 353.5 kg CO2 eq to 92.0 kg CO2 eq, with similarly substantial reductions across most other impact categories. These findings underscore the critical role of energy decarbonization and additive optimization in improving the environmental performance of plastic recycling operations in Ghana and comparable sub-Saharan African contexts.

Source: PLOS Sustainability and Transformation. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000259. Abstract from the publisher’s feed; HTML formatting and repeated author line removed.

Authors: William V. Smith, Stefan R. Pulver

An increasing number of research institutions and funding bodies are making sustainability a focal point. The rapid rollout of auditing processes, such as the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF), and changing institutional policies, are creating demand for sustainability accounting upon researchers. Despite the increasing expectations on researchers to actively report their sustainability and demonstrate improvement, easy-to-use, and accurate reporting tools for electricity-associated emissions (scope 2) accounting are not widely available. Here, we created WillCO2st - a free program that enables fast, publication-read sustainability reports. WillCO2st makes use of real-time, region-specific conversion factor data freely available through resources like the Carbon Intensity and Electricity Maps API to create experimental carbon footprinting estimates using metadata from saved experimental files. Data can be simply click-and-dragged into WillCO2st to create an experimental sustainability audit within minutes. Further, we exemplified the utility of WillCO2st’s live-nudging feature by quantifying the retrospective theoretical reduction in electricity-driven emissions from shifting experimental timing to times of day with lower carbon intensities. Overall, WillCO2st eases time and resource burden on researchers and serves as a model for how researchers can effectively and accurately engage with research sustainability auditing.

Source: PLOS Sustainability and Transformation. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000257. Abstract from the publisher’s feed; HTML formatting and repeated author line removed.