About EBSA18 - Course G - Sustainable and Safe laboratories

Instructors
Mike Dockery, Sui Generis Ltd
Neil Godden, Public Health England

Description
Energy efficiency is a valuable means to address the unprecedented challenges we face resulting from increased dependence on energy imports, scarce energy resources, climate change, and the need to overcome the economic crisis.
Microbiological Containment Laboratories and their associated support facilities have a significant energy footprint. There are regulatory and economic drivers to reduce the energy consumption and reduce consequential carbon dioxide emissions in such building types. Taken further, the increasingly-important sustainability agenda also looks to improvements in other aspects of full life-cycle design efficiency. Critically, however, we must always ensure that safety is not sacrificed on the altar of energy efficiency and sustainability.
This training course, will aim at familiarising biosafety professionals, facility owners and users with available energy efficiency and productively effective design and organisational strategies, and provide them with understanding, knowledge and tools that will help them in an informed and effective way to assess their impact upon the biosafety of facilities.
Group exercises will include the review and assessment of specific energy efficient strategies from a biosafety perspective.
The learning objectives of this course provide CWA 16335 Annex C training in line with BSP core competence 7.2.6 Containment principles and 7.2.9 Facility (re)design, construction, commissioning, decommissioning, validation, operation and maintenance to perform tasks B.2 and B15

Main topics
Specific outcomes of this one day training course will be:

• An understanding of, the acceptability of energy saving technologies and sustainability measures within the context of microbiological containment facilities including for example, the need for ventilation and the impact of reducing or increasing ventilation rates;
• An understanding of full life-cycle design efficiency issues as: embodied energy; flexibility and adaptability (reuse rather than replace), environmental impacts scientific productivity, organisational/functional systems, and environmental impacts;
• Awareness of the world movement towards sustainable labs including organisations, methods, targets, and the ‘whole life cycle’ philosophy.