This innovative project transforms undergraduate teaching laboratories into living labs to reduce single-use laboratory plastics (SULP) and advance sustainable practices. Through collaborative research, pilot interventions, and student engagement, it will develop practical solutions that minimize waste while supporting high-quality teaching and broader climate action. We interviewed the project team to learn more about their work.
Interviewees:
- Dave Ng, Associate Director and Professor of Teaching, Michael Smith Laboratories, Science
- Kate Andrews, Lead, Green Labs & Strategic Sustainability Programs, Campus & Community Planning
- Natalia Bercovich, Research Associate, BRC Molecular Biology Lab Lead, Rieseberg Lab, Science
Q: How do you intend to navigate the balance between reducing single-use plastic waste and maintaining excellence and convenience in laboratory teaching protocols?
“Our vision is grounded in the principle that sustainability should enhance, rather than compromise, teaching quality and laboratory safety,” says Professor Dave Ng, the project’s faculty lead, and Associate Director and Professor of Teaching at Michael Smith Laboratories. We recognize that single-use plastics are often selected for practical reasons, including sterility, convenience, and efficiency in high-volume undergraduate labs. With courses that can involve hundreds of students and run multiple times per year, any changes must work within these operational realities.
Our project takes a systematic approach to understanding where meaningful reductions in single-use plastics are possible. This includes working closely with educators to map current practices, identify pain points, and test realistic alternatives through audits, consultation, and pilot implementations in actual teaching settings. From there, we focus on solutions that are both practical and scalable, whether that involves substituting materials, improving reuse and inventory systems, or refining specific lab protocols to reduce unnecessary consumption without altering learning outcomes.
Overall, the goal is to show that sustainable teaching labs can remain rigorous, efficient, and student-centered, while also helping students engage with sustainability as an essential part of modern scientific practice.
Q: Can you explain how the interdisciplinary collaboration with the School of Creative Writing and Visual Art will facilitate the intended cultural shift?
Reducing laboratory waste isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s also a cultural one. A lot of the habits around single-use plastics in labs are built into how we teach and do science, and the full scale of that waste can be hard to picture. The intention is that through these interdisciplinary collaborations, we can translate what we’re seeing in the data into something people can connect with more intuitively.
“We have some initial ideas for these creative elements, which will ideally function both to visually represent waste volumes and to catalyse reflection and conversation about assumptions related to laboratory disposability,” explains Natalia Bercovich, the faculty co-lead and Research Associate in the Department of Botany. That said, we also want to leave room for the process to evolve and be shaped through collaboration rather than being too prescriptive upfront. Ultimately, the goal is for the creative outputs to sit alongside the technical work and reinforce it, helping to shift how people think about single-use plastics in labs and opening up space for new norms and practices to emerge over time.
Q: What key barriers do you expect to encounter when surveying educators about adopting sustainable lab alternatives, and how will you address them?
“We know that the easy, straight-forward steps to minimizing laboratory waste have largely already been implemented, so we do anticipate a number of real and persistent barriers,” says Kate Andrews, project staff lead and Strategic Sustainability Programs Lead at UBC Campus & Community Planning. There are practical considerations around whether suitable and scalable alternatives exist in all cases, and whether they can meet strict requirements around sterility, safety, reliability and cost. Of course, we have to be careful not to compromise learning outcomes, where students are building foundational lab skills under tight time constraints. And crucially, pressures like increased preparation time for instructors may mean some interventions are non-starters in practice.
To address this, phase 1 of the project involves direct consultations with educators to better understand the real constraints and opportunities. We will test potential interventions through small-scale pilot projects in real teaching environments to identify and demonstrate strategies that work in practice, not just in theory. Overall, that iterative cycle is what allows us to ensure any changes are not only impactful, but also practical, safe, and realistic within the context of high-volume undergraduate teaching.
Q: How will the findings from your comprehensive audit of undergraduate labs be translated into actionable policy recommendations for the university?
The audit will generate broad-scale baseline data on the types, quantities, and drivers of SULP use in undergraduate teaching laboratories at UBC, alongside insights into operational constraints and opportunities for intervention.
Recommendations will be developed through analysis of audit findings, pilot outcomes, educator feedback, and operational feasibility. We anticipate recommendations may relate to procurement practices, preferred sustainable alternatives, standardized waste reduction guidelines, curriculum design considerations, infrastructure needs for reuse systems, educator supports, and incentives for sustainable laboratory innovation. By aligning findings with UBC’s Climate Action Plan 2030 and Zero Waste Action Plan 2030, the project will provide a practical roadmap for scaling successful practices across campus.
Q: Can you elaborate on the structure of the "Sustainable Teaching Labs Symposium" and how it will promote the adoption of your toolkit beyond UBC?
The Sustainable Teaching Labs Symposium is intended as a culminating knowledge-sharing event that brings together the people who can help move this work forward: educators, laboratory staff, sustainability practitioners, researchers, students, and institutional leaders. The goal is to create a space where we can share what we’ve learned, support dialogue on the outstanding challenges, and explore practical pathways toward more sustainable teaching labs.
We see it as a shared event, featuring findings from the audits and pilot projects, examples from participating teaching labs, panel discussions, and opportunities to talk openly about what worked, what didn’t, and what might be adapted in different teaching contexts.
Importantly, the symposium is not just about sharing results, it’s about supporting action. The Sustainable Teaching Labs Toolkit will be launched as a practical resource containing implementation guidance, case examples, lessons learned, evaluation tools, and adaptable recommendations for different laboratory contexts. We will leverage inter-campus peer networks to support knowledge exchange beyond UBC and position the toolkit as a transferable resource for institutions seeking to reduce laboratory waste while maintaining educational quality.