I have a friend who recently embarked on a voyage from NZ to Hawaii on board a traditional sailing Waka, or canoe (visit the voyage website, it’s really cool!). The trip is not only a way for the participants to engage with their heritage as sea-faring peoples but also a chance to raise awareness about ocean-related environmental issues like acidification, ocean trash, overfishing, etc. Part of their pre-voyage training focused on the impact that they will have on the ocean and ways they can minimize this impact while at sea.
One of the Wakas in the marina in Auckland: 
Great effort went in to planning how they might go about reducing waste but in the end, the solutions are not that complicated. They bought bulk shampoo and soap for the crew that comes in biodegradable containers. They minimized the waste that will come from the kitchen by making sure that products are in metal cans or cardboard that won’t float around the ocean for thousands of years to come. This got me thinking about oceanographic research cruises because ocean trash is a real issue and humans have to stop dumping plastic into the oceans.
As a marine scientist I’ve often wondered at the many things we do in the field and in the lab that create waste and have an overall negative impact on the marine environment.
When we go to sea, it seems that no one is paying attention to the waste we create on board because everyone is too concerened about their own scientific mission. Everyone brings their own plastic bottles of shampoo, and myriad of other toiletry products. I’ve heard stories of deep-sea submersibles that have come across trash at hydrothermal vent sites that they eventually figure out was generated on the ship. I’m hoping to talk with people in charge of the WHOI fleet and other scientists that I go to sea with about ways the ship can minimize its impact on the sea. But, most importantly, I will make a commitment to doing better myself and only bringing ocean-friendly products with me to sea. Do you have stories of waste at sea or can you think of ways that we can be better?
This is WHOI's R/V Atlantis—how can we green this ship?!
After collecting animals at sea, most of my actual “sceince” happens when we get back on shore. Certain types of laboratory science create massive amounts of plastic, rubber, and chemical waste. Because I’m interested in population genetics I do most of my work in a molecular biology lab working with hundreds of tubes, pipette tips, latex and nitrile gloves, and 96 well plates, which means I go through lots of plastic and other synthetic materials that we throw away. Lab waste doesn’t get recycled beacause it’s often covered in nasty chemicals. I’ve often wondered why no one has found a way to get around this. Is there some way to wash or melt-down and purify the plastic pipette tips? Why do we have to throw away so much plastic?
Eppendorf glorifies their "consumable products" by publishing free monthly wallpaper art for your computer, like these rt PCR plates:
There are several differences between my lab here at NIWA and my home lab at WHOI, like the use different reagents, different protocols, or different brands of chemicals for certain reactions. I’m often a bit hesitant to use something new partly because when I go back to WHOI, it’s important that I be able to replicate the work I’m doing here. But in some cases, there are alternative methods to what I’m used to that could be more effective, cheaper, or even reduce waste.
For example, there are two contrasting ways to “clean up” a gene product that we get from PCR. Essentially, PCR makes a bunch of copies of one particular gene of interest. Once the reaction is run, there are some reagents—chemicals and pieces of DNA—that we want to get rid of because they might make it harder to sequence the gene that we’ve copied. To do this, I usually use a column clean-up method, produced by QIAGEN. Essentially, there is this magical tube (see below) with a membrane made out of silica that selectively binds the DNA we want and allows us to wash away everything we don’t want. In the final step, you rinse the DNA off the membrane into a new tube and you’ve got a “clean” product. Then you throw away the columns and the all old tubes.
At NIWA, someone has suggested that I use a different method called ExoSAP, which is an enzyme cocktail that digests the small bits of DNA that we don’t want. I was hesitant to accept this suggestion, but while looking at the website and reading that it advertised itseld as the “greener method” to clean up PCRs, I realized that I should really have a go because it could seriously reduce the waste that my project produces and will likely work just as well.
I’m sure that there are many ways that we can work on laboratoy trash, it’s just that someone needs to sit down and think a bit about it. I’m going to try to dedicate myself to being more aware of the ways that my science impacts the environment because there’s little sense in claiming that I’m out to conserve the oceans if I am, in fact, doing harm to the environment in the process.
