environmentalism and chemistry

I named this blog better living. So I ought to post something about trying to live better, right? At the same time, it is supposed to be a professional blog, and I want to keep it that way. So I will. This post is going to combine the two.
Environmental awareness, sutainability, whatever you want to call it, people have lots of opinions on it, and people have lots of different ways of expressing those opinions. Fair enough. I personally am tryign to think about how I can make this world last longer, how I can make my life still work, without sacrificing the life of future generations that I'm giong to depend on once I get older enough to need it. If you don't like that, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not on my blog. Okay so relating this to chemistry-How do we make chemistry more sustainable? There are people doing wonderful chemistry to solve all kinds of environmental problems- I'm not going to list them all here, they'd be too numerous. That's obviously important. But not everyone can be working on cleaning up lakes all the time. People have got to eat, most people like to shower and have soap everyday, we want to wear something, we want to get from point a to point be in a hopefully not that crazy manner. This requires other chemistry. And I personally think that could stand to be responsible as well. So, apart from explicitly "green chemistry" how do I try to green my chemistry? Mostly the things that they always tell you-if you don't need it, don't use it, and if you do need it, see if you can do it with less
1. Making standards-this is admittedly a function of glassware availability. i try hard to only use 50 mL of standards, because that is the smallest volumetrics that we have. I'd do smaller if I could. This is also affected by amount of solution I have to pipette. If that was much smaller, I couldn't do smaller volumetric flasks. so, finding the optimum here. Which means less waste of chemicals. Bonus
2. Trying to use fewer plastic centrifuge tubes. It still makes me nuts how many of them are used in a given day, and how many I throw away. That said, there is a drawback here with regards to contamination. While I try to use fewer of them, the line sometimes down to either use a fresh tube or risk sample contamination. No dice there. This is something I do think most employers should encourage, because frankly at the rate I still end up going through those tubes, it can't be cheap.
3. Air drying glassware rather than acetone drying it. If it's going to be a while before I need to use it, why even bother with adding additional chemicals?
4. Proper cleanup. This might be the one thing that isn't inherently beneficial for the companies bottom line as well, though it doesn't have to be expensive, but is important. I try to minimize how much waste I make to begin with, and try to deal with it appropriately. Don't surprise the custodians. And I feel for any company like the cost of proper disposal will be cheaper than the cost of cleanup later.
5. not using disposable cups. This is admittedly because I live in an area where water isn't an issue, so I can wash the ceramic coffee mug from the kitchen every day. But I really don't want to throw away another piece of Styrofoam every morning. By the same token, using tap water instead of bottled. By now I don't think it's a big secret that most bottled water is just tap water that has been filtered. so why pay the money, why waste the plastic, why bother? I've got a cup, I've got the tap.

There are, however, still environmental issues that I haven't found a way around
1. Use of heavy metals. I'm testing for heavy metals using ICP. That means standard solutions of pretty nasty environmental things, like As, or Cd. Not fun. But, using this technique, there isn't' away around that.
2. Those plastic tubes, as mentioned above. Even trying to minimize, I will still regularly go through a pack of 50 50 mL centrifuge tubes. They work well for what they do, and washing/reusing has limits.

This is something that everyone can do, and companies can encourage. It does save money to reduce waste.