UNC labs are going head-to-head in an international energy efficiency competition

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the article incorrectly identified Carlos Patiño Descovich. The article has been updated with Patiño Descovich's correct name. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for this error. 

The largest consumers of energy at UNC cover less than 14 percent of its campus. 

In an effort to reduce energy usage in labs and spread awareness about different sustainability practices, UNC has joined an international competition called the Freezer Challenge. Initially, the competition will be between labs on campus, but there is also a chance to compete on a global scale. 

New to UNC, the challenge is run by the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories and My Green Lab. Because labs are the largest consumers of energy, the third largest consumers of water and the largest producer of waste at UNC, the challenge will help the participating labs focus on reducing energy consumption in ultra-ultra low temperature freezers, ultra-low temperature freezers, lab freezers, refrigerators and cold rooms.

The challenge was started at UNC by the Graduate and Professional Student Federation, UNC Green Labs Committee and The Three Zeros Initiative and will run from January to May.

“Within the freezer challenge, there are a whole lot of guidelines given on how you can have better inventory of what’s in your refrigerators and in your freezers. You can share with other people and you can defrost them regularly to have them function better,” said Hadley Hartwell, a lab manager in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering and co-chairperson of the Green Labs Committee.

Teams can get points by employing guidelines including:  good management practices, temperature tuning, introducing new practices and retiring and replacing old units. These points will be recorded on monthly scoresheets and provide participants with information about their progress, said Carlos PatiñoDescovich, sustainability and transportation chairperson of the GPSF.

The UNC lab that wins will receive an energy-efficient ultra-low temperature (-80°C) freezer, according to the UNC Green Labs website. The lab that wins the overall international competition will be awarded a feature about their lab written in Nature magazine and a stipend to attend the 2019 International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories Annual Conference in Boston. 

The idea was first brought to UNC by Patiño Descovich, who encountered My Green Lab about two years ago at a conference, where he was able to learn more about lab sustainability and the Freezer Challenge.

“I thought it would be a really cool thing to bring sustainability to labs at UNC, and with the Freezer Challenge, I thought that would be a good starting point,” he said. 

Patiño Descovich said that current scientific education, at all levels, is not highly concerned with spreading sustainable practices to students, and that he hopes the challenge will help train both current and future scientists in new, more efficient practices they can use even after their time at UNC.

“No one really worries too much about (sustainability), so we’re really trying to educate people about how they can make their labs more sustainable, and refrigeration is one of them,” Patiño Descovich said. “There are things that we don’t think about that can dramatically change the amount of resources that we use to run a lab.”

Other important benefits of the challenge’s practices are to increase safety and to reduce the waste of samples, a problem that was brought to light in current years by accidents involving sample storage, Descovich said. 

One notable example of this is an incident that occurred in 2012 at Harvard University, where a lab lost the molecular information stored in 147 human brains after a freezer failed, according to an article by Nature. The failure was caused by both human and technological mistakes, according to the article, and the loss was especially devastating, as one-third of the brains were derived from deceased people with autism and donors are in short supply. 

Alongside consideration for sample preservation, the Freezer Challenge allows for the University to take inventory for the number of freezers, which lab manager Jayne Boyer said will help with further sustainability practices.

Those involved said they are hopeful about the impact of the challenge and the awareness it spreads will have on sustainability at UNC.

“I’m in this world where our conversation sort of centers around this sort of thing — energy reduction and what you can do about it in the lab — and then having this freezer challenge, it’s reminded me that other people aren’t having that conversation,” Hartwell said. “Hopefully, more people are thinking about this and discussing it and working on ways to reduce energy in their lab.”

@stephaneemayeer

university@dailytarheel.com