BY MELISSA LING AND LEE POORE
Professor Hathaway: “I want to start seeing a lot more of you in the lab.”
Chris Knight: “Fine, I’ll gain weight.” Real Genius (Tri Star Pictures, 1985)
For several years, the industrial hy- giene community has attempted to gain weight in the green building movement by demonstrating our value to those leading the charge, mainly architects and engineers.
We’ve had some small victories,
especially in the realm of indoor
environmental quality testing and
the identification of hazards during
demolition. However, the industry’s
embrace of health and safety professionals in the critical phases of a
green project—the design, construction and maintenance of green facilities—still leaves much to be desired.
Greater strides have been made in
specialty buildings, where design and
construction professionals are accustomed to working side by side with the
owner’s EHS department. The most
prominent of these buildings, of course,
are health care facilities. The second
most prominent, and the topic of this article, are laboratories.
Many economic factors affect laboratory sustainability. Labs leave an energy
and environmental footprint five times
greater than that of commercial buildings. In a university setting, a typical lab
accounts for 40 percent of utility bills
even though it may represent only a
quarter of the total square footage of
buildings on campus. Furthermore, most
existing labs can reduce energy use by
30 percent or more by merely focusing
on low-cost improvements.
Administrative Controls
Currently, a sustainability certification
system does not exist for laboratory facilities. Laboratories for the 21st Century (Labs21), a collaboration between
the Department of Energy and EPA,
was established more than a decade
ago to improve the environmental performance of U.S. labs. Labs21 differs
from other sustainability guidelines in
that its basic principle is to “seek ways
to synergistically improve workplace
health, safety, comfort and productivity
while reducing environmental impact”
(our emphasis).1
Unlike the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED process of “chasing points” for
building certification, the Labs21 Environmental Performance Criteria (EPC)
begin with a process checklist immediately recognizable to anyone practicing
environmental health and safety:
• Select an Energy/Sustainability
Champion
• Select a multidisciplinary design team
with sustainable design experience
• Establish sustainability goals (
including energy use)
• Train occupants on proper use of low-energy equipment and features, especially fume hoods
• Set up continuous or periodic moni-
toring of energy and environmental
performance
In any lab setting, the focus is on re-
search and its potentially positive contri-
butions to humankind. Therefore, funds
are directed toward improving research.
In this light, Labs21 recognizes that
changing occupants’ behaviors can
vastly outweigh many new gizmos on
