Category Archives: green champions

Why do we wear disposable gloves in Chemistry labs?

Posted on September 3, 2012 by

Do you wear disposable gloves in the lab? Our undergraduates wear them even when building spectroscopes out of cardboard boxes and sticky tape, let alone handling solutions. Our graduate students, working in the research labs use them all the time … Continue reading →

Posted in green champions, safety, saving money, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

UCL Chemistry water flow update – ups and downs

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

Annoyingly I pressed publish accidentally so an incomplete version may have been posted out to the few subscribers I have – apologies for wasting your time. Time for an update on the water flow situation in our Department. In case … Continue reading →

Posted in carbon footprint, climate change, green champions, Uncategorized, water | Tagged , | 4 Comments

And the water flows on…..

Posted on June 30, 2011 by

Through the autumn and winter I wrote several times about our Department’s water use and our attempts to get a handle on where the water was going and then to find ways to stem the flow.  As I haven’t written … Continue reading →

Posted in green champions, water | Leave a comment

And yet it flows…..

Posted on December 17, 2010 by

Christmas is in the air. Temperatures are dropping again. And we are only days away from the Departmental Christmas shut down. To my surprise, it didn’t prove too hard to get agreement to ensure that every single experiment in the … Continue reading →

Posted in green champions, water | 2 Comments

Is Idealism dead?

Posted on October 2, 2010 by

Start of the academic year. Time for me to give my annual lecture on lab safety. As the person in the department who, I suspect, has done himself more damage doing chemistry or chemistry-related activities, I was fingered a couple … Continue reading →

Posted in climate change, green champions | Leave a comment

And yet the water flowed on….

Posted on August 24, 2010 by

As “Green Champion” I invited myself to a meeting about our Department’s water consumption last week. In the past no one seemed really to care about the issue, but last week we got no less four representatives of the College’s … Continue reading →

Posted in carbon footprint, climate change, funding, green champions, water | 1 Comment

A rude awakening for a Green Champion….

Posted on August 2, 2010 by

Ten days ago I was invited to a meeting of the “Green Champions”. At UCL, that is the rather toe-curlingly embarassing name given to a  person in a Department tasked with driving forward “the green agenda”. I was appointed to … Continue reading →

Posted in carbon footprint, climate change, energy, green champions, Uncategorized | Leave a comment