Green Labs Fund
Making a positive environmental impact on the Okanagan Campus
If you’re looking for financial support to reduce the environmental impact of your research activities or laboratory, then this is the fund for you! Health, Safety & Environment are looking for creative solutions to UBC-specific sustainability concerns and challenges at the university. The Green Labs Fund is available to researchers from both the Okanagan and Vancouver campuses.
All UBC staff, faculty and students are eligible to apply.
Green Labs Fund
The Green Labs Fund is an award offered annually by the Green Labs Program to promote and support sustainability in labs across our campuses.
Eligibility
The Green Labs Fund is available to applicants from both UBC Okanagan and UBC Vancouver campuses. All UBC staff, faculty and students are eligible to apply.
Proposals should:
- Strengthen sustainability at UBC through the reduction of environmental impacts of research activities
- Benefit the UBC scientific community
- Be within the range of $250 to $4,000
- Have an immediate or short-term benefit and practical applicability
Funding applications that meet the following additional criteria may be considered more favourably:
- Projects with measurable outcomes
- Projects that are creative and innovative
- Projects that are scalable and could be implemented by other researchers/departments at UBC
Learn more about the award here, including about previously funded projects.
How to Apply
To apply, please complete the Green Labs Fund application form and submit to green.labs@ubc.ca
Note: This year’s deadline was Sunday, March 20, 2022.
Previous Okanagan recipients:
A Biology laboratory at UBCO received $1000 to replace water baths and ice buckets with reusable Lab Armor beads. The project helps to reduce water and energy consumption.
Three applicants from the Okanagan campus have had their Green Research Proposals funded by the Green Research Fund. The successful applicants were:
- Chemistry Laboratory Manager, Sandra Mecklenburg, in the Chemistry department of the Irving K Barber School of Arts and Sciences. She will be reducing the amount of water used in Undergraduate first-year labs by replacing water aspirators with a vacuum pump system.
- Zoё Soon, an instructor in the Faculty of Human and Social Development. Zoё‘s project involves purchasing models to use in place of anatomical samples thereby reducing hazardous waste from disposal.
- Tim Abbott, a student in the UBC Okanagan Bioreactor Technology Group, directed by Dr. Cigdem Eskicioglu. Tim will be purchasing equipment to take chemical oxygen demand measurements using 75% fewer chemicals than used previously.
Shut the Sash energy saving results
Did you know that fume hoods at UBC consume up to 10 percent of campus energy due to the large volume of air that needs to be heated or cooled and moved through them?
The Shut the Sash is a six-week competition to save energy through one simple action: closing laboratory fume hoods. Shut the Sash ran from November-December 2020 in Chemistry D and E, where labs competed to save the most energy.
The results of the campaign are in! We saw an approximate 7 percent reduction in the volume of airflow relative to pre-campaign data, meaning important reductions in energy consumption. If this behavior can be kept up Cin hemistry D and E alone, it would translate into energy cost savings of $350over of a year!
A huge congratulations and thank you to Chemistry D and E for your participation and efforts to conserve energy and shut the sash! A special congratulations to our two winning groups, Orvig and Fryzuk.
Health, Safety and Environment applauds these initiatives for the positive effect it will have on our consumption of water and production of hazardous waste. Additionally, a reduction in hazardous chemicals means a safer workplace due to less interaction with potentially harmful materials.
