Although the work done in the lab is no more dangerous or toxic than it was 40 years ago, regulatory changes have created huge increases in transportation, materials, and energy costs. The consequence is a significant increase in the carbon footprint for the standard lab building, a reduction in productivity and space efficiency, and in many cases a decrease in the safety of the research environment.
When I worked in a biochemistry lab at Stanford in 1966 there was one trash can that sat on the floor in each knee space. There was one other small trash container in the fume hood where we deposited the Kimwipes we had used to transfer radioisotopes in the hood. The radioisotope container was collected (typically monthly) and taken to one of the government decay sites by a special vendor. Collection of the floor trash cans was taken care of by a janitor who came by each evening and emptied the trash cans into a canvas cart, which he emptied into a dumpster at the loading dock. The dumpster was taken away every morning by the municipal waste disposal agency and taken to the local dump.
The large matrix printed in the digital edition (www.labdesignnews.com/december2008) shows what the same typical lab currently does to dispose of its trash. As many as 30 containers are handled by a group of waste disposal agencies, and a dozen vendors supply the receptacles and liners. This doesn’t include the liquid waste that exits the sink drains or the lab exhaust, which must be treated in a variety of ways before it exits the building.
What can be done to reduce the redundancy and inefficiency of the waste stream management process? The stakes are high as the lab clutter, administrative entropy and large volume of waste containers challenges the environment’s capacity to accommodate important research.
Challenges Because the foremost intent of codes and regulations is to protect public health and safety, laws and regulations have been created with the goal of separating the dangers of lab work from the general public and protecting the lab building occupants as much as possible. As global warming and sustainability share the limelight, the impact of the lab building waste stream on the environment is of increasing concern. With public agencies, departments, commissions and private industry scrutinizing new methods and materials that continually emerge in lab activities, regulations and codes are being continuously updated and added. But no single entity monitors the collective effects of these new requirements on overall safety or research needs.
Those of us involved in the research industry, either directly or as service providers, are charged with providing facilities that enable scientific organizations to achieve their goals. Consequently, we must understand the government regulations and their purposes, and produce safe and functional facilities.
The problem Biomedical research labs in North America, Europe and Asia have a common practice that requires separation of biohazard, radioactive and chemical waste from common trash. However, those four categories are further subdivided in many different ways on each continent. And those subdivisions are different in each country and each region.
California, a leader in biomedical research, is frequently also a leader in regulatory practice. Over the past 30 years, this state’s procedures have often been adopted by other states and ultimately have influenced standards worldwide. The regulatory bodies and standards that have the greatest impact on waste handling are those promulgated by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the International Code Council, the National Fire Protection Association, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, as administered by local fire departments, hazardous materials departments and waste disposal companies.
The three main components of the waste stream are air, solids and liquid materials. However, the primary interest of this article is to discuss the waste components that have to be manually removed from the site.
The impact of solid waste on the research industry has grown gradually but is now accelerating worldwide, due to the increased focus on security and hazardous substances. The clash with environmental concerns has the lab industry caught in the middle, where the need to contain and track the materials has produced a monstrous carbon footprint encompassing administration, containers, transportation and disposal.
The digital edition provides expanded information about the nature and depth of the solid waste problem facing laboratory facilities today (www.labdesignnews.com/december2008).
Remedies Many regulations regarding hazardous materials have come from academic and industrial labs and general industries. It is the latter situation that causes overly stringent regulations to be applied for research conditions, where the quantities and concentrations of the hazard are considerably less than in large industrial applications. As the biotech industry has grown, the research lab, as opposed to the industrial or teaching labs, has earned its own identity and more relevant regulations. Our hope in this time of development of the health and safety industry is that we can improve research conditions in five principal areas:
• Improve safety. The clutter that has befallen the research environment impedes safe access and egress from the research areas. Scientists often carry radioactive, infectious and toxic materials within and between labs. To reduce tripping and stumbling over the myriad of containers that have no other place than the floor, architects need to provide space for these containers; regulators need to compare the safety gains to the safety hazards; and facility staff need to manage the storage of the container and liner inventories.
From an architectural standpoint, we design casework with built-in trash receptacles to accommodate as many of these vessels as possible. We also locate all waste containers at the lab entry in an organized assembly so the collectors do not need to enter the lab.
• Reduce space use. The 30 containers listed in the matrix (digital edition) take up valuable research space in each lab. Often there are more than 30 containers, because containers are located at each lab bench, on the floor, on the benches—and there is an additional inventory of empty containers and liners on shelves, in the storage room and in alcoves. Additionally there are the main collection points at the loading dock. What used to be a fraction of a percentage of real estate is now close to 5%.
The areas most impacted are tissue culture labs where biohazard work is frequently done; standard labs; vivariums; and storage areas. One way to reduce this clutter is to share large- or mediumsize receptacles at a sink cabinet drawer, instead of placing small receptacles at multiple locations.
• Reduce time to manage. Finding hazmat contractors, with the accompanying security risks; ordering and stocking 30 types of vessels and their liners and pans; hiring, managing and educating the EHS staff; negotiating with the refuse disposal community; explaining the trash program to the jurisdictional authorities; and responding to inspectors and inspection reports is a daunting responsibility. One of the most difficult aspects is the inspections by the city, county, state and federal officials who have different interpretations of the requirements.
Our goal is that self-monitoring will relieve the industry of this huge cost to the governments and research facilities. Currently more jurisdictions that cannot manage the inspection and plan check process are putting the liability where it already rests, which is the design professionals and the site EHS specialists. For example, the city of Chicago allows the design professional the option of self-certifying the construction documents or submitting them to the city, which outsources them to another design professional for approval.
Since the research organizations and design professionals are already liable for injuries, the jurisdictions can reduce their costs by making facility owners responsible for some of the safety monitoring. This would greatly reduce confusion and misunderstanding about the regulations, since the number of parties and coordination would be reduced.
• Reduce cost for collection/disposal. The cost to collect and transport hazardous materials, and the dump-site fees, are significant and increasing. The best way to reduce this cost is to reduce the volume and number of collections.
Currently the research industry is reducing the amount of radioactive labeling in favor of fluorescent tagging and other tracking technologies. Current use of radioisotopes is less than 50% of what it was 10 years ago.
One source of chemical waste is expired chemicals that were never used. If research companies order in smaller quantities, using practices such as just-in-time delivery, they can reduce the waste quantities and collection requirements.
• Reduce energy consumption, greenhouse gases, pollution and landfill. When the environmental impact of the packaging, collection, monitoring and disposal exceeds the environmental impact of the pollutant, then we have exceeded our moral authority and wasted valuable project time and money. If the carbon footprint of the container exceeds that of the contents, and if the potential danger of the contents is less than that of the container itself, we need to revise the process.
One paradigm shift in this industry would save significantly in all of the five areas above is wasteto- energy incineration. Contemporary incinerators can reduce all the lab waste into harmless effluent, except for the radioactive waste. As in the 1960s, all waste except for the radioactive waste could be placed in one bin in each lab. That bin would be taken to a site or central incinerator that would convert the high-BTU waste into electrical energy. However, this waste stream vision will need to undo years of legislation and public relations to reverse the current wastesegregation paradigm.
The stakeholders of the trashremoval processes are the research organizations, the regulatory jurisdictions, the transport and disposal companies, the transfer and disposal facilities, recycling centers, the general public, and the environment. It is important for the facility designers and managers to understand the many elements of this process in order to best protect the researchers, the general public and the environment, as well as the goals of the facility.
Kenneth A. Kornberg, AIA, is the president and founder of Kornberg Associates|Architects (www.kornberg.com), an architecture firm that has specialized in programming and designing science facilities since its inception in 1979. Architectural services range from site analysis through post-occupancy evaluation. Kornberg has offices in San Diego, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Published in Laboratory Design: Vol. 13, No. 12, December 2008
