Project Collaborations

EPFL Course collaboration

Life cycle assessment in energy systems

This course aims to enable students to use modern environmental analysis tools for the life cycle of products and processes and to understand their limits of applicability.

LCA considers the various stages of a product’s life, including raw material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal.
Source: https://ecoinvent.org/life-cycle-assessment/

How did SV Sustainability helped ?

SV sustainability lead the composition of a list of practical cases provided for this course. For their semester project, students had the opportunity to pick from different topics, see some examples below.

Examples of comparative LCA topics

Single-use tubes, flasks, and well plates are heavily used in research laboratories. However, in an effort to reduce the volume of waste generated by her research, Tenure Track Assistant Professor Camille Goemans, who works in a biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) setting, chose to opt for reusable glassware solutions. Is this an environmentally sound decision?

BSL-2 lab work involves agents of moderate potential hazard to people and/or the environment. Therefore, everything that exits the lab must follow strict safety procedures. The suggested LCA project compares the use of plastic consumables that must be inactivated and then incinerated, versus the use of glassware that must be washed, sterilized, and packaged before it can be reused.

Contact people

Camille Goemans, EPFL – Tenure Track Assistant Professor, SV ([email protected])
Juliane Miani, EPFL – Sustainability Project Officer, SV ([email protected])

Single-use pipette tips are widely used in life sciences and other labs, and constitute a very significant part of the waste they generate. Grenova is a US-based company that produces a machine, the TipNovus, which cleans pipette tips for reuse.

The LCA project is a comparative LCA, where the baseline entails the use of disposable pipette tips (business-as-usual), and the alternative consists in using the TipNovus to clean and reuse the tips. The functional unit could be using pipette tips 100’000 times to conduct research over the span of a year.

Contact people

Juliane Miani, EPFL – Sustainability Project Officer, SV ([email protected])
Mark Hozza, Grenova ([email protected])

Student Project

Plast It Back: Recycling laboratory plastics

A pilot project that brings together students from all over EPFL with the mission to raise awareness about the problem of plastic waste in SV laboratories.

The project has two goals:

Establish a sustainable logistic chain by creating a network of partners as well as assessing the environmental impact with a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
Raise awareness within EPFL’s community on single-use plastics and their recycling process

The Plast It Back project, in close collaboration with SV Sustainability, was founded in the context of the class of Humanities and Social Sciences at EPFL. Our team is composed of 10 highly motivated and curious EPFL students from various backgrounds:

Precious Plastic Léman: They manufacture sustainable everyday objects from plastic waste found in the Leman Lake.
PlastOk: Plastic recycling workshop inspired by “Precious Plastic” in Geneva.
Zero Emission Group: An EPFL student-led initiative, aimed at finding solutions against climate change.
Blaser Design Bern: Handicraft company producing design pieces made from swiss natural products.