Looking back at sector-changing environmental initiatives!
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- We look back on the winning environmental initiatives from the 2020 CiteAb Awards
- How did an initiative result in over 120,000 planted trees?
- How was 650,000 cubic feet of EPS foam kept out of landfill?
The CiteAb ‘Environmental Initiative of the Year’ Award was launched in 2020 as a way to recognise and share the sector’s best ideas on how to reduce negative environmental impact of life science.
Environmental best practice is something we are passionate about promoting at CiteAb, so we were excited to bring back the environmental initiative award for 2022. We recently wrote a blog focusing on these new and exciting initiatives as a record for others in the sector looking to make positive changes.
Today, we catch up with the winning suppliers from 2020 to ask them how their environmental initiatives are continuing to promote best practice and enact real change. Here’s what they had to say…
The 2020 Environmental Initiative of the Year Winners
Taking home the inaugural title for this award in 2020 were GenScript and ThermoFisher. The judges could not choose one winner between the two; both initiatives were so strong that it didn’t seem right to not recognise them both.
Genscript sought to tackle the issue of deforestation by building a tree planting programme.
ThermoFisher set out to reduce the amount of polystyrene coolers going into landfill by developing an alternative.
How have these environmental initiatives progressed into 2022?
Now two years on, we wanted to check back in with how these environmental initiatives had progressed.
At GenScript, a significant number of new trees have been planted since we last checked in on the initiative. Through this programme, both the issue of deforestation and waste is being tackled through incentivising customers to go paperless! So far they have focused on planting trees in areas requiring habitat restoration, or building back up ecosystems after fire. You can read more here.
As of 2021, Genscript had planted more than 127,664 trees. That’s an additional 37,664 since they won this award.
ThermoFisher’s completely recyclable paper cooler continues to successfully ship chilled products to labs around the world. Since we caught up with the initiative in 2020, their use has expanded beyond the US to include regions such as Europe and Australia.
The number of temperature sensitive products needed in research is significant, so providing a curbside recyclable alternative to expanded polystyrene coolers (the preferred external packaging for cold chain shipments for decades!) is an easy, efficient and effective way to reduce the environmental impact of research.
This greener cold-shipping solution has now been the recipient of multiple awards after CiteAb recognised it in 2020, such as the Gartner Power of the Profession Supply Chain Awards for Social Impact of the year in 2021 and a recent Dutch Afvalfonds Verpakkingen 2022 award for Best Recyclable Packaging.
The new paper cooler has been used to ship more than 1,000,000 temperature sensitive product orders. This has eliminated approximately 650,000 cubic feet of EPS foam, which equates to 24 Olympic swimming pools.
Find out more
Read more about these initiatives, as well as details on many other impactful categories which are part of the CiteAb Awards, over at the CiteAb Awards website.
We were really excited to find impressive environmental initiatives being brought to life in 2022, with our environmental initiative of the year winners Chromotek and 2BScientific as prime examples.
We can’t wait to bring this category back for the 2023 CiteAb Awards and see how the industry continues to make positive change. If you know of any initiatives, or your company has launched an exciting new initiative recently, please do look out for when entries open over at our awards website and submit a nomination!
- Rebecca and the CiteAb team
