While collecting fish samples along Montreal shorelines, McGill MSc student Anthony Gagliano was startled by the amount of plastic waste.
“From masks to bottles and Styrofoam, there was garbage everywhere,” he recalled. “I began cleaning up what I could, and then I translated that effort into my everyday life.”
Gagliano brought this commitment to sustainability to the Fish Population and Conservation Genomics Laboratory, where he and PhD student Marie Launay have reduced plastic waste in lab procedures by almost 50 per cent.
The lab, led by Denis Roy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, is part of the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. With Roy’s help, Gagliano and Launay established additional sustainability practices that could become models for other labs. Their work was recently featured in Nature’s Spotlight on Green Labs.
The team also recently earned a Gold-level McGill Sustainable Lab Certification from McGill’s Office of Sustainability, a distinction shared with only five other labs across the university.
‘The kind of solution the lab community needs’
When Launay and Gagliano had begun quantifying the amount of plastic waste generated by their research, they were surprised by the result: 7.77 kg of waste resulted from their creation of a genetic library from DNA extracted from 96 fish samples. They planned to analyze a total of 518 samples, and realized that without taking action to reduce plastic waste, one laboratory procedure would produce 41 kg of plastic.
One major change was to move to non-loaded pipette tips, whose packaging uses half the plastic of pre-loaded alternatives. This shift also saved the lab money, as non-loaded tips were less expensive. The team also discovered that pipette tip boxes could be decontaminated via autoclaving, allowing them to reuse boxes multiple times and further reduce waste.
They also developed a protocol for reusing DNA fragmentation tubes, which are typically single use, ensuring that their integrity was maintained while significantly cutting down on disposable plastic.
Regular shoreline cleanups became an integral part of their work. Gagliano and Launay have conducted cleanups at their fish sampling sites across Quebec, reinforcing their dedication to environmental stewardship both in the lab and in the field.
The prospect of earning a Gold certification also prompted the team to explore new solutions, such as the purchase of an automated pipette tip cleaner, which will allow them to clean and reuse tips up to 25 times before disposal. Supported by the Sustainability Projects Fund’s Systemic Solutions to Lab Waste project, this cutting-edge technology is expected to arrive by June 2025. The team also improved lighting efficiency and undertook a freezer cleanup, for example.
“Marie and Anthony’s initiative is hugely consequential” said François Miller, Executive Director of Sustainability. “It’s clear to anyone conducting lab or field work that scientific research has a disproportionately large environmental footprint. Their protocols to minimize plastic waste in high-level research is the kind of solution the lab community needs and the type of action that can help us reach McGill’s Zero Waste target.”
Launay returned the compliment.
“The McGill Office of Sustainability offers a lot of guidance, which is particularly helpful for labs that have no idea where to start with sustainability,” she said.
For information on how to sort and recycle lab items, consult McGill’s new lab waste guides: https://mcgill.ca/x/iTo