Toward more sustainable research: reducing the environmental impact when working with Drosophila

The ever-increasing amounts of plastic waste and greenhouse gas emissions worldwide threaten our environment. Biomedical laboratories across the world generate serious amounts of plastic waste often disposed of via high-emission strategies. Achieving sustainability is imperative but requires awareness and knowledge of the regulations, available options, and their implications. To illustrate the thought processes involved, we showcase the Manchester Fly Facility which supports work with the genetic model organism Drosophila and serves 13 research groups. In 2022, we estimated ∼4 tonnes of "clinical" waste generation by the facility enriched with single-use polystyrene plastic containers, all frozen for 2 days and then incinerated. We calculate the resulting environmental and economic costs and compare them to practices reported to us from other fly facilities worldwide. We then discuss feasible management options, separately explaining alternative choices for (1) container materials, (2) the processing of genetically modified organisms, (3) re-use strategies, and (4) waste management procedures. This information hopefully raises awareness and understanding to incentivize laboratories worldwide to adopt more sustainable choices, as is permitted by their local infrastructure and regulations. To illustrate what can be achieved, we extrapolate the Manchester data from 2022 to a period of 10 years and calculate the impact of different management strategies, indicating that up to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions and 76% of plastic waste can be saved. The resulting economic savings are of further benefit and could be re-invested to pay for additional workforce, which may otherwise pose an important barrier to re-use scenarios in many countries.