Sustainability
A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN ELLIOTT
John Elliott with his home electric heat pump, a key part of his family's effort to move off natural gas use and reduce their household climate footprint.
The Sustainable Berkeley Lab team collaborates with partners site-wide to reduce the Lab’s climate, waste, and water footprint. John Elliott heads the team as the Lab’s Chief Sustainability Officer, a role that was created when John joined the Lab in 2012. April is Earth Month time to look at the Lab's sustainability goals and the largest challenges facing the Lab and the earth.
How does Sustainable Berkeley Lab support the Lab’s mission?
We work to reduce the Lab’s climate, waste, and water footprint. This work typically involves addressing inefficiencies and improving Lab operations. You can learn more at sbl.lbl.gov, and see graphs of progress at sbl.lbl.gov/data.
What are Sustainable Berkeley Lab’s top three or four priorities today?
Our goals involve actions that we take as an organization as well as encouraging people to take actions on their own. There are more than 20 initiatives described in greater detail in a Plan for a Sustainable Berkeley Lab, but let me review a few near-term priorities.
The Lab is working to improve the operations and efficiency of our buildings and to purchase renewable energy through long-term contracts to decarbonize our electricity supply. We need to upgrade our main site water metering, and we can all help by keeping organic waste out of the landfill.
Many of our efforts tackle interrelated aspects of the same problem. If we take food as an example, the environmental impacts of our food can vary by a factor of five depending on the types of food we choose to eat. And then a large portion of that food - 30 to 40% - is never eaten and becomes waste. Over half of this wasted food ends up in the landfill where it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. This is a loop that is worth closing through informed choices, use of food banks, composting, and other strategies. California law (SB 1383) is recognizing this challenge and we will be supporting efforts to implement regulations that will go into effect within a year to significantly reduce the organic matter going to the landfill across the state.
Who do you partner with at the Lab to be successful?
We have strong partnerships with operational divisions such as Facilities and Environment Health and Safety (EHS). We also work with many different scientific units - like ETA, NERSC, and JGI - on longer-term sustainability efforts. For example, we work with EHS to determine the optimal level of building ventilation for safety and efficiency, especially focusing on laboratory spaces. And we work closely with NERSC staff to reduce the energy and water used for high-performance computing. Due to its size and complexity, NERSC represents the Lab’s single largest source of energy and water consumption.
Who from the past, present, or future would you like to job shadow? And why?
I’d like to be working with an experienced sustainability practitioner from the year 2050. By then, we should have mostly decarbonized our economy and made many other advances in eliminating waste. They might help us develop the perspective needed to change our practices with greater focus and all deliberate speed.