While the purpose of cleanroom technology is to prevent noxious gasses from being leached into the environment, it doesn’t mean this equipment doesn’t contribute any carbon emissions.
The laboratories typically used by pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, for example, will contain a broad range of equipment – including isolators, fume cupboards, downflow booths and extraction systems. These all require energy in order to operate. If you consider the full lifecycle of the product, they also need to be manufactured in a factory, transported and will require disposal at some point.
At every stage of this lifecycle, cleanroom equipment is having an impact on the environment. Any company designing or developing cleanroom laboratories will need to consider these implications before an investment is made.
This is a subject that now comes up repeatedly in conversations we have with potential customers. It’s as high on their priority list as factors such as overall cost, quality, lead times and return on investment.
This is partly driven by ethical considerations. But there are also strong commercial and financial motivations, with pressure coming from consumers, investors and other stakeholders, including employees. This is in addition to growing scrutiny from environmental groups and watchdogs.
Regulatory requirements
Governments across the globe are in the process of rolling out legislation that encourages regulators to take action against any company failing to reduce their emissions. This includes the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the UK’s Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR).
These regulations will increase the environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting requirements placed on large enterprises from next year – and this doesn’t just cover their own operations, it covers their supply chains too. So, being a supplier to many large multinational organisations, the environmental impact of Envair Technology and the products we make is currently at the forefront of our minds.
We are looking at our own sourcing practices, and reviewing the raw materials we use and the design of the components we fit into all of our cleanroom technology. We are also looking at ways to reduce energy usage while this equipment is operational.
This is something that has encouraged us to increase our own investment into research and development in recent years. It’s essential that any changes we introduce only enhance the performance of our clean air equipment. The safety of the immediate user has to remain the utmost priority.
We have found there are steps that can be taken to improve our environmental impact, some small, some larger.
Small steps to achieving sustainability
These smaller steps include initiatives that may seem minor but cumulatively add up to make a telling difference. This includes through:
Greater automation - We can achieve this through the integration of digital interfaces and software solutions within isolators. These technologies are designed to enhance quality controls and enable automation of data management processes, which is helping to eliminate wasteful paper-based systems.
More efficient processes - We are also seeing growth in the deployment of technologies that help us to eliminate wasteful and inefficient practices. For example, the use of rapid gassing which uses vaporised hydrogen peroxide (VHP) to sterilise equipment is slowly starting to replace traditional ‘spray and wipe’ practices. This is something that the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has been advocating for some time. Not only is it safer, it also cuts out the need to use cleaning products to wipe down equipment.
Product design - From a product development perspective, we’re also looking to improve the design of products in order to reduce the inclusion of single use materials in operational processes. These would otherwise need to be incinerated after use. In addition to reviewing process waste, we are also looking to curtail waste at the end of the product’s lifecycle when units are disposed of. As much as possible, we want to make sure that our products avoid waste heaps, comprising parts and materials that are easily recyclable.
Elongating product lifecycles - We are also looking to minimise that waste by elongating the lifecycle of our equipment. The best way to do this is by making spare parts readily available and having engineers that are trained and available to fit them. Regular servicing and maintenance is crucial to the smooth running of any operational technology. It ensures optimal performance of the equipment, helping to reduce energy consumption - which is where the big changes can be made.
Reduced energy consumption
It’s in energy consumption, however, where we are looking to make the biggest impact. This has led us to develop and design clean air products that incorporate energy-saving technology wherever possible.
A good example of this is in the use of variable air volume (VAV) in fume cupboards. In contrast to a constant air volume (CAV) control, this significantly reduces energy wastage as it allows laboratory managers to adjust the amount of airflow they use to suit demand or to maintain environmental conditions.
This technology can be used to monitor the position of the fume cupboard sash and close it when not in use. In the low volume range this reduces run to 0.3m/s face velocity, rather than the industry norm of 0.5m/s – achieving a 40% reduction in air volumes.
We were able to demonstrate just how effective this can be when we were asked to create a bespoke solution for a research organisation that wanted to re-fit a large chemistry laboratory in the south of England.
The customer wanted to refurbish the whole facility and include 65 fume cupboards. These needed to be fully compliant with the BS EN 14175 standards and also to enable specific research processes while being ergonomically comfortable. And, as with many modern contracts, another major stipulation was, of course, the need to prioritise sustainability and energy efficiency.
Saving energy and money
This project saw the installation of VAV airflow monitoring which was developed in a way that it ensured the safety of users working with industrial fume hoods. Evaluation of the performance of this technology installation revealed that the VAV system achieved an energy saving of 35,475 kWh per fume cupboard per year, when compared to CAV airflow control.
Across the entire laboratory this equates to almost 2 million kWh per year. Not only is this having an environmental impact, but the energy cost savings are also substantial. This has enabled the customer to achieve a return on investment in just over two and a half years.
This VAV system has now also been accredited by the Carbon Trust for helping laboratory managers significantly reduce their energy use (and therefore carbon footprint) as it only uses the air that it needs.
Conclusion
Developments like the VAV system have huge potential to reduce our environmental impact, in a provable way. They help us to produce eye catching figures that demonstrate the difference we are making, but we also need to respect the impact that smaller initiatives are having.
If we can consider the potential environmental impact during every design and material sourcing decision, help to keep products performing at their optimal levels and then look at how we can assist in the removal of waste from operational processes, it all adds up. This will involve us working closely in collaboration with our customers to understand what they want to do, and how they want to achieve that.
The more we can do that, however, the bigger impact we can have in reducing both theirs and our own carbon emissions and create more sustainable cleanroom technology.
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