UC San Francisco Saving the World One Freezer at a Time

by Dean Shehu, Research Commodity Manager, UC San Francisco

At UC San Francisco, our procurement sustainability efforts thus far have fallen into three categories: spend (expenditure) avoidance, improved asset management, and ‘green’ product choice. As a campus dedicated to medicine, life sciences and biomedical research, our focus has mainly been on research labs, the most energy-intensive operations on campus.

Successful spend avoidance means not spending money on resources whenever possible. To accomplish this, we have implemented a broad awareness campaign to direct lab researchers and assistants to centralized databases that track lab supplies and equipment inventories campus-wide.

These databases provide visibility into surplus chemicals, consumables, and equipment and encourage resource sharing before new acquisition. Another advantage is that exhausting supplies, especially those like chemical reagents, also eliminates the need for costly toxic waste disposal.

Our initial efforts towards better asset management have focused on our fleet of approximately one thousand -80 ULT freezers. These freezers are the default storage technology and workhorses of research labs. However, these freezers are also energy hogs. To mitigate this, our aim is to encourage the consolidation of freezer contents, and thus minimize the overall number of units on campus.

To support this effort, we are piloting a ‘Lab -80C ULT Freezer Cleaning’ which will test the feasibility of mandating an annual ULT freezer cleanout, along with performing preventative maintenance to optimize freezer performance.

But, even better than optimizing not-so-good freezer technology is replacing it with superior freezer technology. We have identified and are beta-testing a liquid nitrogen vapor-phase freezer system – the MVE Fusion – that uses a mere 6.4 kWh/day and requires only an initial filling of liquid nitrogen for the life of the unit. If we replace all -80 ULT units with this model, we would save about $2 million per year. Additional benefits include the lack of moving parts, and its inherent resistance to power outages as it takes nine days to warm from -170C to -130C – a major asset in an earthquake zone like San Francisco.

With so many labs on campus these efforts add up to measurable savings without too much pain and create a roadmap for other campus labs to follow.