Sustainability

Sustainability in a cleanroom is a difficult challenge. However, there's no time to waste – the best time to act is now. Our planet's health depends on it.

In the cleanroom of the University of Copenhagen, we have already taken steps to reduce our day-to-day waste, and we are always active in discussing means to become more sustainable.

We are always open to suggestions to decrease our environmental impact.

User's responsibility

Cleanroom users should be aware of their impact as individuals. As users of NBI Cleanroom we expect you to live by the following:

• We reduce the amount of single-use materials such as:
  • Wipes
  • Disposable beakers
  • Shoe covers on external labs
• We turn off the lights in the fumehood when you are done.
• We follow the guidance on each piece of equipment about when to turn off/idle the equipment. This saves energy and makes the equipment live longer.
• We close the sash of the fume hood when we don’t use it, and we keep it as low as possible while working under the fume hood. This saves energy and keeps us safer. Align the smiley stickers on the edge of the fumehood.
• We use glass beakers instead of plastic whenever possible.
• We label our personal samples, especially those that need long-term storage, in a way that clearly indicates who the sample belongs to and what the sample contains. This way, chemicals and samples don’t go missing and expire. This saves materials.
• We reduce the amount of materials used to minimise consumption.
• We use the appropriate quality of water, that is: we consider when Milli-Q water is truly needed.
• We minimise the use of notebooks and paper by storing your recipes electronically.

The greenest thing you can do in the lab is to make good and reproducible experiments. On top of that, we do our best to use as little materials and reagents as possible. We use the smallest possible plastic item that fulfils our need. We are careful to sort our waste correctly so as much as possible can be recycled. Most importantly, the fumehood bins should contain nothing but items that are contaminated with hazardous waste. Packaging that is not contaminated can be sorted and recycled. 

Implemented strategies

• Supplied the cleanroom with a sufficient amount of glass beakers to substitute the plastic ones
• Substitute shoe covers with reusable and washable cleanroom clogs
• Implemented an exiting procedure for users to ensure proper waste handling and reuse of
• Refurbished consumables such as:
  • Wafer carriers
  • Sample boxes
  • Safety goggles
  • Tweezers

Exiting procedure

Every user terminating their work at the cleanroom of the University of Copenhagen has to get in contact with the cleanroom personnel and plan their exiting procedure.

During the meeting, the user will receive a task list with the relevant tasks they are expected to fulfil.

• Dispose chemicals
• Dispose test samples based on the guidelines
• Hand out important samples and notebooks to principal supervisors
• Return tweezers and boxes for cleaning and reuse
• Empty storage spaces
• Share recipes and knowledge with the cleanroom

You can find the checklist for departing students and personnel in this file.