GREEN LABS

As part of FAS efforts to reduce its environmental impacts, and its greenhouse gas emissions in particular, CCB has teamed with the FAS Campus Energy Reduction Program* to start a comprehensive program to green the practices in our labs.

What You Can Do

The greening of our department relies both on infrastructural changes and on individual behaviors. Click on the links below for information on green measures that you can easily implement in your lab.

Labs consume far more energy than other buildings per square foot. For instance, on Harvard's Cambridge campus labs make up approximately 25% of total building square footage but are responsible for 50% of the utility usage. The ten most energy-intensive FAS buildings are all laboratories, although not all of them belong to CCB.

One of the reasons labs are so energy intensive is that they are typically supplied with 4 - 15 air changes of outside air per hour. This outdoor air must be heated or cooled (conditioned) to levels acceptable to a lab's occupants, which in the Boston climate takes a significant amount of energy. In addition to having special heating and cooling needs, labs are full of equipment that require a great deal of electricity to function.

Building-Scale Changes

Individual behavioral changes are important, as the fume hood contest results show, and structural changes are critical as well. Many projects are underway in CCB right now to improve energy efficiency. They include:

• Putting occupancy sensors on lights;
• Setting back building temperatures and ventilation rates slightly at night;
• Replacing "energy hog" light bulbs with efficient ones;
• Converting constant volume fume hoods to variable air volume hoods.

* The FAS Campus Energy Reduction Program (www.greencampus.harvard.edu/cerp) is a partnership between the FAS Office of Physical Resources and the Harvard Green Campus Initiative (www.greencampus.harvard.edu).