Laboratories on higher education campuses present a host of opportunities for energy and resource conservation. Typical laboratories consume 5-7 times more energy than office and classroom buildings, and fume hoods alone can use as much as 3 times the energy of one house in a given year. In order to address such energy consumption, institutions must design increasingly efficient laboratory buildings.

Often overlooked are practices inside the labs, such as educating occupants and encouraging conservation best practices. What issues can building managers control? What issues can researchers and lab managers control? How can staff, faculty, and graduate students effectively connect with one another and with administrators in order to achieve lab conservation goals?

Join us for the Green Laboratories: Resource Conservation in Research Settings webcast to move towards the coordinated campus approach needed in labs to conserve resources and lower costs, and reexamine common assumptions regarding day-to-day lab operations and maintenance. The event will detail a successful lab conservation program at UC Santa Barbara that engages students, faculty, staff, and administrators in both bottom-up and top-down efforts.

Through this webcast, you will learn the key components of creating and managing a lab conservation program that:

• Engages researchers, facilities managers, EH&S staff, and other administrators
• Addresses behavioral changes
• Conserves resources through campus-wide initiatives
• Assesses laboratories and trains interns
• Improves research performance
• Provides human health, fiscal, and environmental benefits

1. Laboratories: Big consumers on campus
   • Energy and resources
   • Opportunities for conservation with researcher enrollment and staff support
   • Barriers to conservation
2. Empowering research laboratory conservation: Roles for insiders and outsiders
   • Students
   • Staff
   • Faculty/lab occupants
   • Administrators
3. Green labs: Campus-wide programs for energy and resource conservation
   • Fume hood management
   • Ventilation optimization and use
   • Surplus chemicals website
   • Surplus equipment website & property issues
   • Mercury thermometer exchange
   • Campus network
   • Efficient appliances
   • Refrigerator and freezer rebates
   • Zone lighting
4. Green labs: Lab assessments to diagnose common issues, enroll researchers, and serve as teaching and promotional tools
   • Goals of a lab assessment
   • Steps in a lab assessment
   • Considerations in a lab assessment
   • Creating and funding a lab assessment program
   • Assembling your assessment team
   • Assessment team roles
5. Incentives for conservation
6. Synthesis & next steps
   • Which of the following lab conservation measures would you most like to implement?
   • Analysis of 3-4 selected lab conservation measures as starting points in creating a comprehensive lab conservation program