With today’s rising energy costs and increased awareness about the effects of global warming, sustainability is on everyone’s mind. Many organizations have formal programs for reducing energy consumption and waste. Becoming ecofriendly is not only good for the environment and long-term survival of the planet, but studies show that it’s also good for a company’s bottom line. And this is where GenVault can help.
According to a recent article in The Economist , freezers are detrimental to the environment because they release the “most potent greenhouse gas” called HFC-23. Removing even only one freezer from use is equivalent to reducing about 55,000 pounds CO2 over a typical five-year lifecycle or like removing 4.47 cars from the road for one year or planting 7.47 acres of forest.
With GenVault’s cutting edge, revolutionary, room-temperature biosample storage technology that is reliable and robust, you and your organization can also begin to address climate change in an effective and profitable manner. By actively managing your organization’s carbon footprint via GenVault’s complete biosample management system, you will not only lower costs and decrease CO2 emissions, but also increase productivity through streamlined workflows.
For many laboratories, cryo storage is a significant portion of the operating costs. The costs of directly operating a single -80°C freezer for one year can far exceed $1,000 in electricity bills. In addition, rooms that house a large number of freezers may require air conditioning to offset the heat produced by the freezer, thereby further increasing energy consumption and electrical costs. Often times, most researchers are not individually aware of their electricity costs associated with their labs. These costs are typically charged indirectly in the form of overhead that is deducted from research budgets.
By adopting an organization-wide initiative to lower energy consumption and therefore energy-related costs, individuals within an organization can be incentivized to conserve energy resources. GenVault’s dry-state room temperature storage technology allows researchers to reduce the number of freezers necessary to maintain their biosamples and thus reduce the number of kilowatt hours (kWh) utilized each year. Each of GenVault’s systems features the GenPlate that allows a wide variety of biosample types to be stored at room temperature. This unique building block eliminates the need for storing biosamples in freezers or liquid nitrogen tanks while maintaining samples in a stable, organized, and traceable format. GenPlates enable GenVault to utilize hardware with little or no power requirements for sample storage. For example, the DeskTop Archive, which requires absolutely no power to operate, is a 2 cubic foot storage module that holds a maximum of 38,400 aliquots (1 freezer tube equals 1μg of DNA while one GenVault element equals 1μg of DNA). For larger sample collections, the Personal Archive is available to store up to 460,000 aliquots and requires only 3 kWh/day to operate, in comparison to the more than 20 kWh/day required by a -80°C freezer.
Take a moment to explore the Energy Savings Calculator and see how much of a difference you can make both, financially and environmentally, by adopting the GenVault Solution.