Sustainability in Higher Education Research

In this episode of the Meliora podcast Student Takeover Season we are going to talk about sustainability in research. With a global push towards sustainability such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) there’s a growing conversation around whether scientists have an obligation to conduct research in ways that minimize environmental impact.

Host: Julian

Guests:  Bronwyn and Jake

Transcript

Sustainability in Research

Introduction:

Julian: Hello and welcome to the Meliora Podcast from the Sustainability and Resilience Institute at the University of Southampton. This episode is part of our Global Sustainability Challenges module during Student Takeover Season. I’m your host, Julian—a final-year biomedical sciences student here at Southampton. Today, I’m joined by two fellow students: Bronwyn, a second-year environmental geosciences , and Jake, a second-year geography. Thank you both for joining me. How are you both doing this morning? 

Bronwyn: Yeh good thank you! 

Jake: I’m well, thank you

Julian: Lovely! Love to hear it. So today we are going to talk about sustainability in research. With a global push towards sustainability —think of the UN’s SDGs—there’s a growing conversation around whether scientists have an obligation to conduct research in ways that minimize environmental impact.  

Section 1 – Personal Experiences  

Julian: Jake please start us off, you study geography—what have you found to be some of the most prominent sustainability challenges in your field? 

Jake: Yeah, thank you. You know I think the standout issue for me is the carbon footprint associated with travel. In physical geography, much of our work requires us to be on-site, whether we’re investigating glacial retreats or studying wildfire recovery, like I did on a field trip to Tenerife. That trip was only a week long but generated 616kg CO2. So, it’s pretty clear that preparing for these trips and the travel itself can really add up environmentally.  

Julian: That makes sense and I hear where you’re coming from. And Bronwyn, how do you weigh the value of physically visiting a site against gathering data from academic literature or experts that are already there in the field? 

Bronwyn: Yeh great question. In geosciences, I think there’s a clear advantage in being on the ground. I would say that a lot of my learning and consolidation has come from fieldtrips which provide a deeper understanding of the theory that we learn about in lectures. Much of the fieldwork in these areas as well is crucial in our understanding of and progression towards green and renewable energies such as geophysical exploration techniques. I’m studying a geophysics module at the moment and I came across an interesting piece of literature in the geophysical sustainability atlas, which maps out how geophysical techniques can contribute to work towards the UN SDGs. It highlights how geophysical research plays a crucial role in tackling environmental challenges (Capello, Shaughnessy and Caslin, 2021).  

Julian – That’s really interesting, is there an example from the atlas that particularly stood out to you? 

Bronwyn: Yeh SDG 13 is climate action and geophysical techniques can be used to develop our understanding and use of carbon capture and storage or even using these techniques in exploration for renewable resources and hydrocarbons.

Julian – Jake I can see you are absolutely itching to ask a question, please. 

Jake: I am, but Bronwyn don’t you think it’s also ironic that sustainability research can also be polluting? 

Bronwyn: I think there’s a fine line between the need to learn more and conduct research to help us tackle the climate crisis but we also need to make sure we are going about this in a way that doesn’t make it part of the problem. A paper from the Tyndall Centre for climate change research made a really good point about the research community needing to map out acceptable practices of researchers and ensure that the behaviours are aligned with the research findings that are coming from their research (Paige-Green, 2011). Again, from personal experience, I think a lot of my understanding has come from seeing the concepts we have learnt in lectures in the field. It has been a big learning curve for. But I do think that maybe, not every fieldtrip has the required learning value to justify the carbon footprint that we are creating from them.   

Jake: Yeah you know I’m on the same page as you. For instance, my trip to Tenerife was essential because the issue was region-specific. The observational data I collected—like rating crown damage on a scale from one to ten—is very subjective and unique to that location. Even though remote sensing, such as satellite imagery, can reduce travel needs, we still rely on ground-truth data to ensure our models are accurate. 

In other words, fieldwork and remote methods really go hand in hand and are actually quite complimentary. 

Julian: See I find that absolutely fascinating because my perspective on biomedical research shows a very different challenge. One of our biggest hurdles is just the overwhelming use of single-use plastics. I think it was a 2022 paper from some Dutch researchers and they highlighted that a single microbiology lab used up to 385,000 petri dishes in a year, and that contributes to about 13000kg of CO₂ emissions (Aragaw and Mekonnen, 2022) . Less conservative estimations like a one from Exeter estimates that labs globally probably use about 5.5 million tons of plastic in a year (Urbina and Watts and Reardon,2015). It’s almost become a desensitized routine for me until you find a pipette jar that is just full of waste that needs to be bagged in plastic and thrown out again. My green labs, which is a UN backed sustainability initiative, they themselves state that labs are 10x more polluting than office spaces, use 4x as much water, and they found that the biopharma industry is 55% more polluting than the automotive sector (Yususf, 2022). There just isn’t a lot of international oversight in terms of legislation either. Whilst there are initiatives such as lab efficiency assessment framework from UCL, LEAF or they my green lab initiative. Most of the rules governing sustainable practices in labs, from my experience at least , are dictated by individual labs. 

Jake: That’s incredible but I want to ask you a question. Is it really necessary to use brand-new, sterile equipment for every sample? Could you not clean and use the equipment again?

Julian: See now that a great question, I was wondering the same thing myself, and new research has indicated that cleaned pipette tips and plates are just as reliable as fresh ones, but it isn’t a practice that is widely implemented (Clancy, Wade and Young,2023). When you’re working with bacteria for example, even microscopic contamination can absolutely ruin an experiment. The risk of having to repeat work and therefore use even more resources is ever-present. I think there is a prejudice that using fresh equipment outweighs the benefits of washing and reusing. The biggest problem then is that all of this equipment that comes into chemical or biological contaminants just cannot just be recycled. These need to be bagged, once again in plastic autoclaved and then incinerated. So, it’s just an incredibly linear economy. 

Bronwyn: Wow that is crazy, I really didn’t realise the scale of that wastage you’re talking about! I think there is a clear parallel between our fields. Whether it’s the carbon footprint of a field trip or the plastic waste in a lab, the underlying challenge is to minimise our impact without compromising the quality and reliability of our research. 

Section 2 – expert opinions  

Julian: I’m absolutely with you on that, and I think it’d be very interesting to see if experts in our fields have the same sort of opinions that we do. Over the past few weeks we had a little bit of homework, we have reached out to several staff/ research experts here at the University of Southampton for their thoughts on sustainability in research. We asked them three key questions: 1. on a scale of 1-10 how much do you consider sustainability when initiating a study, 2. what are some of the successes and challenges of integrating sustainability into research, and finally, 3. whether the responsibility of ensuring sustainable practice lie with the individual researcher, or with the institution at which they practice. Bronwyn, would you be happy to start us off? 

Bronwyn: Absolutely yeh, so I spoke with Nicola Pratt, who is a lab manager and she is involved in the geochemistry/ chemistry/ biology labs. They have got really involved with work towards making scientific labs more sustainable. And she rated her sustainability consideration as a 7/10 - she said she cares deeply about the environment but obviously no one is perfect!  She also explained that while sustainability is important, there are practical challenges like the need for sterile conditions, like you’ve been talking about Julian, which often means relying on disposable plasticware. She’s actually implemented her own pipetting plans to minimise the amount of waste she produces and has been really successful in doing this which is amazing. At a wider scope, she’s also getting our labs LEAF accredited but argues that it is challenging to get all the lab users to respect the recycling and energy saving initiatives and this has made a lot of work for her creating signs and sending out reminder emails.

Jake – Wow that sounds like she has her work cut out for herself! I was wondering what was her perspective on where the responsibility for lies for sustainability? 

Bronwyn – Yeh so her opinion was that the institution has responsibility to give its employees tools to allow research to be conducted as sustainably as possible however the individual researchers themselves should be responsible for ensuring that they are correctly using all of the tools at their disposal to ensure their research is as sustainable as possible. 

Julian: So she’s the one who makes all those signs in the labs, you know Nicola I would like you to know that I follow all the stickers and signs you put up to a tee. I’m also really glad she brought up LEAF, with all of these sustainability measures in place at our labs. I figured that a similar sentiment towards sustainability would be quite universal. So the answer I received from an associate professor and good friend of mine, Dr. Franklin Nobrega, caught me by surprise. He rated his sustainability consideration as a 1 out of 10, and stated that allocating funds towards sustainable practices are costly.  And that is something I’d actually challenge him on, that sustainable practices are costly in the long term. Grenova is a company based out of the states and they sell this really nifty, automated pipette tip steriliser so you can wash and reuse your pipette tips and they estimate that labs that incorporate their machines into the pipeline are able to their reduce pipette tip consumption by 90% and that is incredible (Freese, et,al, 2024). However, I think there is merit to the point that when you’re working with limited funding that only comes in periodically from grants, buying a £40000 pipette tip washing machine might not be at the top of your agenda. 

Bronwyn: Yeah yeah.

Julian:  And Franklins answer to the 3rd question ,much like Nicola, he believes that sustainability initiatives should be enforced and funded at the operational level. And he does differ from Nicola a little bit, he believes that the individual stakeholder holds very little responsibility to do with this, and I for one actually do see where he is coming from and I have no qualms with.  

Jake: I see where he’s coming from. A geography professor here in Southampton that we spoke with had a similar point of view in that to make sustainability initiatives, in themselves sustainable, there must be systemic change to attitudes rather than just individual actions. They’ve said they would rate their consideration of sustainability as a 6 out of 10 and I think one of the most crucial points they’ve brought up is that there are systemic pressures within the pipeline to prioritise research productivity. They argue that this kind of pressure can promote unsustainable practices given concerns of job security, and career advancement. You know a 2022 study investigating psychology of littering in Vietnam observed that emphasising connectedness to nature has a significant positive effect on littering habits in participants whilst maybe not directly applicable, this kind of mentality could be integrated into fieldwork but challenging to conjure in an enclosed place like a lab (Zhang et al., 2022).

Section 3 – Solutions  

Julian – It’s really fascinating to see how perspectives can shift based on your role in the research pipeline. And Jake I absolutely hear where you are coming from whilst we work in a lab with fundamental elements of nature, connected to the environment we are not. The lab is sleek, it’s monotone, and it’s very sanitary. So I think, I reckon that sustainability in a lab would have to take the form of a circular economy that enables long term equipment reuse as well as cost savings. And this probably begins with the dismantling of the prejudice against washed and reusing equipment. During the Covid pandemic, a team of Danish scientists at a hospital conducting PCR assays from patients, used an automated pipette cleaning system using a weak bleach solution, and in their findings they saw that there was no RNA contamination in their reused tips reagents and they were actually able to overcame the global lab equipment shortage (Aragaw and Mekonnen, 2022)

Jake – So you are saying in one sense, they were able to save lives whilst also being, like you know, cautious of the environment. 

Julian – Exactly  

Jake –  I think that’s an incredible achievement.  From a field work perspective, there’s a lot of talk about making research more sustainable. There’s a paper from Oxford on active travel contributions to mitigating climate change that talks about how walking and cycling can reduce emissions. Even one individual who cycles one extra trip per day instead of driving for 200 days a year can lower their mobility‐related lifecycle CO₂ emissions by approximately 0.5 tonnes yearly (Brand, 2021). So the positive implications of systemic adoption of active travel to local field sites are definitely there. Obviously, that’s not always possible, and internationally, field work is necessary. In these cases, having funds dedicated to offsetting emissions through sustainable fuel could have a really substantial impact on our footprint (Brunn, 2022).  

Bronwyn – Yeah, and on that topic there’s an issue that comes up in The Paradox of the Sustainable Fieldtrip. On one hand, field-based research is really essential for developing innovative solutions to sustainability challenges we are facing; but on the other, the travel and the logistics associated with these trips generate really really significant emissions (Telford, Valentine and Godby, 2023). To address this, I think there is a variety of strategies we can adopt, just a few ideas include conducting post-trip reflections on sustainability practices identifying areas for improvement, promoting low-carbon transport methods wherever possible. As well as trying to offset our emissions and actively contribute to local environmental efforts (Elliott, 2015). But ultimately, we must decide whether field work is really necessary for the study we are conducting then from this operate in a manner that conserves the environment and limits our carbon footprint throughout the process.  

Julian – I couldn’t have argued it better. In the same vein of systemic change, what we’d really like to see I think is a operational shift towards a circular economy in research, end of year debriefs to reflect on sustainability initiatives’, and maybe even some relaxations on certain deadlines to ease stress and promote a focus towards climate friendly behaviour. Whilst lofty, I’d also love to see the establishment of an international coalition of scientists to implement sustainability standards globally.  

Conclusion  

Julian – So that brings us today to the end of our episode. Is there anything you guys would like to add?

Bronwyn – Yeah just quickly to encourage anyone who is listening to think about how individually we can all try and identify and tackle challenges towards sustainability in our day to day lives and our workplaces and maybe even starting conversations about this with those who have the power to make change.  

Jake – And yeah, I would like to remind everyone that sustainability is more than just the environment. Key detriments such as the historical underrepresentation of women in science still have much to improve.  

Julian – Thank you for listening to this Global Sustainability Challenges student takeover 

episode of the Meliora Podcast. Thank you so much Bronwyn and Jake for joining us today.  

Bronwyn and Jake – thank you for having us! 

Julian - I’d also like to thank Alesio, Magda, and Matt for research and production. As well as the experts who contributed key insights into their fields. You can find us on Instagram and X @Meliorapodcast. We hope you will join us again to listen to more fascinating discussions on a range of sustainability topics delivered by fellow undergraduate colleagues at the university of Southampton. Please free to like and subscribe to be reminded of future episodes. This has been the Meliora podcast, Goodbye. 

(Scott and and Gaskin, 2006; Paige-Green, 2011; Urbina, Watts and Reardon, 2015; McCrory et al., 2020; Brand, 2021; Capello, Shaughnessy and Caslin, 2021; Aragaw and Mekonnen, 2022; Brunn, 2022; Yusuf et al., 2022; Clancy, Wade and Young, 2023; Freese et al., 2024; Telford and and Godby, 2024)

Reference list

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Brand, C. (2021) ‘Active Travel’s Contribution to Climate Change Mitigation: Research Summary and Outlook’, Active Travel Studies, 1(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.16997/ats.1036.

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Capello, M.A., Shaughnessy, A. and Caslin, E. (2021) ‘The Geophysical Sustainability Atlas: Mapping geophysics to the UN Sustainable Development Goals’, The Leading Edge, 40(1), pp. 10–24. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1190/tle40010010.1.

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Drelliott.net. (2015). Environmental cost of fieldwork – David Elliott. [online] Available at: https://drelliott.net/environmental-cost-of-fieldwork/.

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Kcl.ac.uk. (2025). Sustainable travel in academia: Reflections from a physical geographer | Feature from King’s College London. [online] Available at: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sustainable-travel-in-academia-reflections-from-a-physical-geographer [Accessed 17 Mar. 2025].

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Telford, A., Valentine and Godby, S. (2024) ‘The paradox of the “sustainable fieldtrip”? Exploring the links between geography fieldtrips and environmental sustainability’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 48(1), pp. 115–132. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2023.2190961.

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