Encouraging Sustainability in the Workplace

Research and development, whether in academic or industry, tends to generate waste. This sessions focuses on steps and initiatives that have been taken globally to minimize waste within a research environment, so that while we are improving the world with innovations we are not also contributing to the decline of our environments and ecosystems. The format will be a survey of recent innovations, including the Tip Cycle Program for pipette tips at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Lab Glove Recycling program at Stanford in collaboration with Ingenium, and the vegetable gardens at Delta headquarters. The hope is that employees and employers will think about the areas in their workspaces where sustainability could be improved by a small margin, and create initiatives to fill that gap.