Category: Life Sciences
Level: Gold
The Impact: <p>Reduce, reuse and replace materials. Limit negative ethical impacts. </p>
Details
Some commonly used laboratory chemicals and animal-derived products have substantial environmental, health, and ethical impacts across their entire lifecycle, from extraction and production to transport, use and disposal. Where scientifically feasible, laboratories should review these materials and replace them with ecological, safer, and ethically-improved alternatives.
This includes reducing or eliminating the use of hazardous chemicals, selecting reagents with lower environmental toxicity, and replacing animal-derived materials (e.g. serum, antibodies, enzymes, peptides) with synthetic, recombinant or otherwise non-animal substitutes.
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