Introduction

Chemistry laboratories are essential for training scientists. Every year, thousands of UoA students learn to pipette, titrate, and synthesise in courses like CHEM 110, CHEM 120, and beyond. But there is a hidden cost to this education. Teaching laboratories generate significant chemical waste. Unlike research labs where every millilitre is accounted for, teaching environments often prioritise learning outcomes over efficiency. Students learning to measure often over-measure. Technicians preparing for large cohorts often over-prepare. The result is solvent going down the drain, pipette tips filling landfills, and a generation of scientists trained in habits of excess rather than precision. 

This disconnect between institutional sustainability goals and actual student behaviour is a systemic issue across university environments. Waste often becomes an invisible byproduct of daily routines when systems prioritise immediate convenience over long-term environmental accountability.

To understand how to redesign these laboratory habits, it is first necessary to look at how design and human behaviour interact in the shared spaces we navigate every day. 

This observation did not come from reading journal articles alone. It came from walking through UoA and AUT campuses as part of my SUSTAIN 200 passport activities, where I was asked to critically evaluate sustainable and unsustainable practices. At the UoA Clock Tower, I saw a discarded glass bottle under a bush despite bins being nearby. This is evidence that infrastructure alone does not change behaviour. At the AUT Engineering Building, I noticed vending machines stocked with single-use plastic packaging, contributing to waste that students walk past every day. These small moments made me realise that sustainability is not just about having the right bins or policies. It is about design, behaviour, and awareness.

When environmental metrics and wasteful habits remain unaddressed in everyday environments, people naturally disengage from the consequences of their actions. This psychological barrier is particularly damaging in educational spaces like teaching laboratories, where students are actively forming the foundational habits of their scientific careers. If we want future scientists to act with precision and care, we must embed sustainability directly into the physical infrastructure and equipment they interact with every single day.

Bridging this gap requires moving away from traditional, passive laboratory tools and toward dynamic systems that actively promote behavioural change. By redesigning the very mechanisms used to handle everyday materials, we can make the environmental footprint of an experiment visible and actionable.

This article proposes a conceptual solution: EcoDose, a smart reagent dispensing system designed specifically for undergraduate teaching laboratories. EcoDose does not exist yet. It is a proposal and a design for how we might rethink one small but significant part of laboratory practice. By combining off-the-shelf technology with educational feedback interfaces, EcoDose aims to reduce waste while training students to think sustainably.

The Problem:

Why Teaching Labs Waste More Than They Should

Let’s start with a common scene in a first-year chemistry lab. A student needs 5 mL of hydrochloric acid. They pick up a graduated cylinder and pour from a 500 mL reagent bottle. They pour 6 mL. They adjust, and pour the extra 1 mL down the sink. This happens dozens of times per lab session, per student, per course, per year.

While a single milliliter of spilled or discarded reagent might seem insignificant in the moment, these individual actions accumulate rapidly across a massive student body. When multiplied across entire semesters, this casual, routine behaviour transforms into a major environmental and economic burden for the university, manifesting in distinct operational layers.

The waste adds up in three ways. Measurement error: Manual dispensing using graduated cylinders or even standard pipettes is imprecise, especially for students learning the skill. Over-pouring is normal. Under-pouring requires a second attempt, doubling waste. Each error means more chemicals entering the waste stream. Over-preparation: Laboratory technicians prepare stock solutions in advance to ensure enough for everyone. Predicting exact demand is difficult, so they err on the side of excess. Unused stock expires and is disposed of. Pipette tip waste: Standard micropipettes use disposable plastic tips. Each tip is used once, then discarded. A single lab class of two hundred students can generate thousands of plastic tips in one afternoon. 

When these three vectors of laboratory waste, user inaccuracy, operational over-preparation, and single-use consumables are combined, they create a compounding cycle of material depletion. The immediate financial and physical volume of this waste is problematic enough on a local scale, cluttering university disposal systems and straining departmental budgets. However, focusing solely on the physical bins inside the laboratory obscures a much larger ecological footprint.

To fully appreciate the necessity of a system like EcoDose, we must trace these materials back to their origins and forward to their ultimate disposal sites. This requires shifting our perspective from localized laboratory habits to the broader, often unseen systems of waste lifecycle management across our campus environments.

The environmental impact extends beyond the bin. Manufacturing chemicals requires energy and produces carbon emissions. Disposing of hazardous waste requires treatment and incineration. During my campus observations, I saw how easily waste becomes invisible. At AUT, I found rubbish under hedges near the food court. There were discarded items that someone had dropped and no one had noticed. At UoA, I observed shared microwaves in the Engineering Building that encourage students to bring food from home, reducing takeaway packaging. Both examples taught me the same lesson. Infrastructure shapes behaviour but only when it is visible, accessible, and designed with users in mind. A waste bin that is hidden will not be used. A recycling label that is confusing will be ignored.

I also visited four nature sit spots across UoA and AUT to further evaluate what makes a space usable versus ignored. The UoA Architecture area worked because it was sensory-rich. It had pebble paths, dense bushes, umbrella-shaded benches, and it intentionally reduced urban noise. The AUT Engineering balcony worked despite having no vegetation because it offered open-air exposure and a view of distant trees. The lesson was consistent across both assessments: small, thoughtful design changes produce meaningful behavioural outcomes. A bench in the wrong place goes unused; similarly, a laboratory layout that hides its inefficiencies will naturally foster waste. EcoDose applies this same principle to the laboratory: make waste visible, make precision easy and students will change how they work.

What Already Exists (And Why It Is Not Enough)

Several strategies have reduced waste in teaching labs. Each has strengths, but each also has limits. Microscale chemistry is the most widely adopted approach. Instead of using beakers and test tubes, microscale uses small wells and micro-tools. Reactions use tiny volumes. Sometimes one hundredth of traditional amounts. This works well for qualitative experiments where exact precision is less critical. However, microscale still depends on student technique. A student who over-dispenses into a micro-well has still wasted reagent relative to the tiny target volume.

Beyond downsizing reaction volumes, institutions have experimented with a variety of operational and chemical alternatives to mitigate laboratory waste. While these methodologies target different stages of the chemical lifecycle from procurement to post-experimental disposal, they encounter similar limitations when applied to large-scale undergraduate education.

• Green solvent substitution replaces toxic chemicals with safer alternatives. For example, some labs replace dichloromethane with ethyl acetate or ethanol. This

reduces hazard but does not reduce volume. A student can still pour 10 mL of ethanol

when 5 mL would suffice.

• Solvent recycling is gaining traction at some universities. Used acetone or ethanol

is collected, distilled, and reused. This reduces disposal volume but requires

equipment and energy for distillation. It addresses waste after dispensing, not the

dispensing behaviour itself.

• Automated liquid handlers exist in pharmaceutical research. These robots dispense

microlitre volumes with high precision [1]. They are also expensive,  often tens of thousands of dollars per unit, making them impractical for a teaching lab

with twenty to forty student stations.

When evaluated together, these current industry practices reveal a significant gap in laboratory sustainability strategies. They either treat the symptoms of waste after it has already been generated, or they rely on industrial automation that is financially impossible to scale for hundreds of undergraduate students. Ultimately, none of these interventions address the root cause of the problem: user awareness during the act of manual measurement.

None of these solutions provide what teaching labs actually need: a low-cost, real-time feedback system that helps students see exactly how much they are using and adjust their behaviour accordingly.

To understand how a system like this might function, we must first examine the visual baseline of current university infrastructure. The gap between student intent and sustainable outcomes is often exacerbated by the tools themselves, which isolate the user from the ecological consequences of their movements. By evaluating how traditional setups fail to provide this necessary engagement, we can identify exactly where behavioural interventions need to be physically integrated on the laboratory bench.