December 2025

Driving Sustainability in CU Boulder's General Chemistry Teaching Labs

Did you know that thousands of students pass through CU Boulder’s General Chemistry Teaching Labs every semester? As a result, small actions for efficiency by each student adds up to large impacts. The staff of the CU Boulder General Chemistry Teaching Lab Program have been paying attention to find and implement modifications for sustainability in the teaching labs.

Strive for Excellence with My Green Lab Certification

CU Boulder labs presently have an opportunity at no cost to their lab to become certified for their sustainability efforts. Labs can achieve bronze, silver, gold, platinum or green certification based on the sustainability best practices they implement. Certification is through the nonprofit My Green Lab, a leader world-wide in lab certification for sustainability.

4,500 labs and 50,000 scientists in 50 countries have achieved My Green Lab Certification.

Join them by emailing greenlabs@colorado.edu to sign up.
CU Boulder Green Labs will support your lab on your certification journey and come to your lab group meeting to provide more information on how the certification process works.

CU boulder animal bedding compost efforts

Did you know that vivarium animal bedding is composted at CU Boulder?

CU Boulder produces about 42 tons of animal bedding waste per year as a byproduct of animal research. Thanks to efforts of the Office of Animal Resources (OAR), Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S), the CU Boulder Green Labs Program, and Zero Waste Team an initiative to compost animal bedding was established. An early pilot program was started through funding from a SustainableCU Grant in 2017. The pilot was successful and led to a campus-wide implementation a year later. So far approximately 150 tons of material have been diverted from the landfill since 2017. To learn more about this composting effort and how it was developed, please check out this video.

Green Labs Shared Equipment Core & Wish List

Check out our Green Labs Core webpage and last month’s article to learn more. Also consider reading about the BioCore model on this page.

WISH LIST - Here are our current needs to repair existing equipment and meet researcher requests:

Freezing Point Osmometer (e.g. ELITechGroup FreezePoint)
Cryostat
Small refrigerated centrifuge (with rotor for 1.5/2mL tubes)
Probe Sonicator (e.g. Fisher Scientific 550 Sonic Dismembrator)
Agilent TapeStation
Insect respirometer
High vacuum scroll pump
Diagenode Picoruptor (or similar)
Bioruptor sonication device

Please email greenlabsCORE@colorado.edu if you have any of these items to donate.

Friendly Freezer Competition Between CU Boulder and CU Anschutz

In connection with the 2025 International Laboratory Freezer Challenge, CU Boulder and CU Anschutz chose to have a friendly competition to see which of our two CU campuses could earn the most points for sustainable cold storage practices. The competition ran from January 1st to July 1st. The International Laboratory Freezer Challenge, sponsored by the non-profit organizations My Green Lab and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories, encourages labs to take actions to improve sample accessibility and integrity, reduce costs, and improve energy efficiency. They report their individual efforts through a survey. CU Anschutz ended with a total of 41 points among 4 participating labs while CU Boulder finished with a total of 55 points between 5 participating labs. Congratulations to CU Boulder and a huge thank you to both institutions for helping to promote efficiency and effective cold storage!