Sustainability

The AASHE 2025 Conference & Expo, October 22-24 in Minneapolis, MN, is your strategic opportunity to lead the charge in higher education sustainability.

In a world demanding decisive action, this conference serves as a pivotal forum for:

• Strategic Vision: Engage in high-level discourse on the evolving landscape of sustainability, and gain insights to inform your institution's long-term strategy.
• Leadership Development: Connect with a network of influential peers, cultivate strategic partnerships, and enhance your capacity to drive meaningful change.
• Knowledge Exchange: Participate in curated sessions designed to foster deep learning and facilitate the exchange of best practices among leading sustainability professionals.

This is more than a conference; it’s a catalyst for change! Secure your place and empower your institution's sustainability journey by registering before July 18 for early bird rates.

This webinar will take place at 10am Central European Time (4am Eastern Time). The same webinar is also being presented on April 10th at 1pm Eastern Time (see separate event listing here).

Air Monitoring is a very important analytical field in environmental analysis and industrial hygiene. It is a discipline whose sole aim is to ensure the air we breathe is safe and free from hazardous VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds). VOCs can be emitted from products of daily use or emitted during the manufacturing of polymers, adhesives, paints, petroleum products or pharmaceuticals.

To monitor such compounds in the air, these are trapped in collection devices such as tubes or badges with adsorbents. For analysis, the trapped compounds need to be desorbed from the adsorbents. This could be achieved using a solvent (solvent desorption) or by heat (thermal desorption).

This webinar discusses the details of thermal desorption, its benefits and limitations compared to solvent desorption. In particular, it demonstrates why thermal desorption is the much greener approach for air monitoring using different application examples and metrics based on the 12 Principles of Green Analytical Chemistry for the greenness of analytical methods.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• Theory and background of Thermal Desorption in Air Monitoring
• 12 Principles of Green Analytical Chemistry
• Approaches to assess the greenness of analytical methods
• Sustainability advantages of Thermal Desorption

Speaker:

Frank Michel, Ph.D. Technical Marketing, Scientific Education & Sustainability, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

Frank Michel received his diploma and PhD in Analytical Chemistry at University of Muenster/Germany. At Bernina Biosystems, a biopharmaceutical company, he developed and validated analytical HPLC and other methods for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), including excipients and drug products. Later Frank changed to Sigma-Aldrich and had various roles in Product Development, Marketing and Customer Education in Analytical Chemistry. After an engagement at HWI Analytik, an analytical service provider for the pharmaceutical industry, he returned in 2010 to Sigma-Aldrich (since Nov. 2015 part of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany) as Scientific Advisor for Analytical Chemistry. During his career, Frank focused already on Green Analytical Chemistry, e.g. by miniaturization in HPLC for solvent savings and the solvent-free extraction technology SPME. Since 2022 he is responsible for sustainability and training in Chemistry.

Frank is a member of both the Sustainable Chemistry and the Separation Science working group in the German Chemist Society (GDCh), member of the IUPAC project team “Greenness of official standard sample preparation methods” and in the EuChemS-DAC Sample Preparation Study Group and Network.

While there is a lot of discussion about WHY we need sustainability (Climate Change, Forever Chemicals, Human Toxicity, Ecosystem Degradation…) and WHAT we should do to measure and characterize sustainability (LCA’s, UN SDGs, Circular Economy, Safe and Sustainable by Design, Planetary Boundaries…) It is especially important to discuss HOW we should make these changes. This is the domain of Green Chemistry.

When a researcher contemplates a new experiment, when an inventor imagines a new product, he or she makes several small and large decisions that will have profound impact on the ultimate sustainability of what they do. If they do not have the skills and tools to understand the sustainability implications at the mechanistic molecular level (green chemistry), it is unlikely that they will successfully achieve sustainability objectives. This presentation will discuss how green chemistry can be integrated into the earliest stages of research and development to ensure maximum sustainability. Real world, commercialized examples will be used to illustrate key points.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• The Why’s and the What’s of sustainability are important, but solutions come from How (green chemistry).
• It is not enough to simply WANT to create sustainable technologies, there are certain critical skills required, as defined by the 12 principles of green chemistry.
• Not only does green chemistry have moral and ethical implications, but it is also a pathway to accelerate R&D and lower costs. (If you truly understand green chemistry).
• Several commercialize products illustrate the reality of green chemistry’s successful implementation in the real world.

Speaker:

John C. Warner

CEO & CTO, Technology Greenhouse, LLC

John Warner is one of the founders of the field of green chemistry. He wrote the book that provides the definition and 12 principles of green chemistry with Paul Anastas in 1998.He received his B.Sc. from UMASS Boston and his PhD from Princeton University.As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents and has worked with hundreds of companies worldwide and serves on the sustainability advisory boards of several multinational companies. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014 from The Society of Industrial Chemistry.As an educator, he was a tenured full professor of chemistry and a tenured full professor of plastics engineering at the University of Massachusetts where he started the world’s first PhD program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications in synthetic methodologies, noncovalent derivatization, polymer photochemistry and metal oxide semiconductors. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring (PAESMEM) from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and President George W Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society. In 2007 he cofounded Beyond Benign, a nonprofit green chemistry education organization with Dr. Amy Cannon.As an entrepreneur, John’s inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. In 2016 he received the Lemelson Invention Ambassadorship from the Lemelson Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences (AAAS).

Laboratory work is resource intensive. Large equipment such as -80°C freezers use on average as much energy as a single-family home, plastic consumables are necessary but leave a huge amount of waste, and water consumption is also immense. So, the question is what to do? After all, samples have to be stored safely, experiments cannot be easily changed, and desirable measures are often simply not possible for safety reasons. Checklists and green lab guides can help and are a good starting point. However, every laboratory is different and has its own questions, hurdles and problems. A suggestion that is easy to implement for one lab may be difficult or even impossible for a neighboring group.

This is where Ecomapping® comes in. With its help, laboratories create an individual action plan. The core of the method is to focus on the environmental impacts of laboratory work, such as waste, water and energy consumption, emissions, chemicals and consumables, but safety aspects are also taken into account. This presentation explains the key features of the methodology and uses practical examples to give an insight into the improvements that laboratories can achieve using it.

After attending the webinar you can expect to:

• Understand the concept of Ecomapping® and how it can be tailored to address the unique sustainability challenges in different laboratory environments.
• Learn about the significant environmental impacts of laboratory operations, including energy consumption, waste generation, and water usage, and how to assess these factors effectively.
• Discover practical strategies and actionable steps for implementing sustainability measures in your laboratory.
• Learn about the successful application of the Ecomapping® method through best practice examples.

This webinar will be recorded and will be available on demand later, if the time doesn't fit to your time zone!

Speaker:

Dr. Kerstin Hermuth-Kleinschmidt

NIUB Sustainability Consulting

Kerstin Hermuth-Kleinschmidt graduated in chemistry and holds a PhD in microbiology from the university of Freiburg, Germany. She worked for several years in sales and technical customer service in the life science industry, before she turned her attention to the topic of sustainability. As an independent consultant, speaker and author of publications on various aspects of sustainability, her focus is now on the implementation and monitoring of sustainability processes and the practical implementation of sustainability in scientific work and research. She offers workshops and lectures on specific aspects of sustainability in laboratory and research work and the context of life sciences companies as well as individual support. In her daily work with labs, she uses the Ecomapping® method that helps labs to develop their individual action plan to make lab work more sustainable.

Since 2017, she has also been teaching as part of the “Studium Generale. Forum Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft” (FORUM) at KIT Karlsruhe as part of the Sustainable Development degree programme to pass on her knowledge to the younger generation.

The My Green Lab Europe Summit 2025 brings together scientists, sustainability leaders, and industry experts from across Europe to explore scalable solutions for greener labs and lab products.

This free virtual event will highlight how laboratories, institutions, and policymakers are advancing sustainability through product innovation, organization-wide initiatives, and sector-wide policy changes while ensuring compliance with evolving European regulations.

Whether you're a researcher, lab manager, or industry professional, you'll gain the knowledge and connections to help drive meaningful change in lab sustainability.

For more information visit: https://mygreenlab.regfox.com/my-green-lab-europe-summit-2025.

As the landscape of sustainability in higher education continues to evolve, we understand that the changing policies under the new federal administration are impacting campuses across the country. To help our members navigate these changes, and to offer support amidst so much change, AASHE will be hosting a discussion series every Tuesday throughout March. This series will be facilitated by AASHE staff and board leadership, and will offer a space for members to come together, discuss challenges, share insights, and explore how AASHE can best support campuses in these challenging times. While we may not have clear solutions, being in community with sustainability change agents will hopefully create an opportunity for collective processing and exploration of productive responses. 

• When: Tuesdays in March (March 4, 11, 18, 25)
• Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM (EST)
• Format: Informal, member-driven discussions facilitated by AASHE staff & board 
• Location: Virtual via Zoom (link provided upon registration)

This is an opportunity for all AASHE members to connect, share experiences, and gain valuable insights from your peers as we collectively work toward advancing sustainability and climate action in higher education.