Sustainability

CNB

Environmental Sustainability

At 22^nd April 2022 (“International Mother Earth Day”), the CNB-CSIC Environmental Sustainability Committee was created with the support of the CNB Board Committee.

Our mission

Our main mission is to promote environmental consciousness and create a culture of environmental sustainability in our research institute, in which our CNB community can engage and commit to improve to advancing sustainability by the integration of sustainable practices and implementation of environmental measures.

Our main goal is to promote the ecological transition of our institute to achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals in order to mitigate or reduce the effects of the climate change.

To perform that, we seek out proactive and integrated approaches to environmental sustainability – based on good practices – and support the achievement of our objectives. CNB-CSIC is fully committed to promote more sustainable practices in research and administration, to contribute, in our daily work, to fight climate change and pollution.

We have been working together on the analysis, documentation, suggestions and following up of several actions in order to get more environmental sustainable working areas.

All these detailed actions are collected in our CNB Green Guide. This document is updated and reviewed constantly to ensure the implementation of new actions.

Documents and Guidelines

RECYCLING GUIDE (ENGLISH)

POSTER (ENGLISH)

If you have any suggestion or want to join us, please, contact us:

Committee Members

e-mail us

Action plans

The Green Committee has set up several action plans, with the aims of raising awareness, improve our surrounding environment, reduce the environmental impact derived from our daily working and research activities at the CNB and even when commuting to work. By the initial analysis of our surrounding working area, we have implemented several measures and performed good practices that allow us to tackle important issues related with climate change:

Waste identification and management

Research in life sciences produce big amounts of plastic waste difficult to manage. From this committee we want to encourage our researchers to reduce the environmental impact due to the waste production derived from our experiments and offer alternatives to reduce and reuse specific plasticware materials.

Our main policy in waste management is following up the “3Rs policies: Reduce, reuse and recycle”. Important actions have been already done in the identification of improvement points at the CNB to get more efficient waste management and waste treatment. This committee is promoting the awareness in the reduction of waste in the labs but also outside research areas (as cafeteria and offices).

Further actions are planned not only to reduce waste contamination but also to raise awareness in some daily actions to help out the planet.

2. Travel and commuting to work

Due to the increase of pollution levels in big cities as Madrid, we are committed to follow up and encourage more sustainable mobility practices by the use of public transport and other sustainable means of travel such as bicycles. To promote that, we have created a useful map to get work by bike, create a car-sharing system to commute together or installation of electric car recharge points at the institute.

3. Energy consumption

From our committee, we all are committed to reduce the consumption of energy at the CNB in order to reduce our impact at the environment. To reach this goal, we have established a list of good practices that all CNB members can perform in an easy way and therefore, contribute actively to reduce energy consumption. Our committee accepts and studies suggestions from other CNB members that could be implemented as measures to reduce energy consumption.