Water usage in the lab: we cannot do without this precious blue resource, but we can do a lot better

Water is essential to life on Earth, and it's an extremely precious resource.

Water scarcity affects every continent. According to the UN, an estimated 1.42 billion people, including 450 million children, live in areas of high or extremely high water vulnerability. Set against that, research labs are extremely water-intensive, and most lab workers are consuming considerably more water at the bench than they are at home, often without realising it.

Condensation is a bigger water user than it looks

Conventional condensers are water condensers: they promote condensation of vapours and gases by passing cold water around them continuously, which adds up to a substantial volume over the course of a working day, largely unnoticed because the water isn't visibly "used" in the way a rinse or a wash is.

Rinsing habits make a real difference

It's simple, but true: reducing the amount of water used when rinsing and washing lab utensils can make a genuine difference at scale. Many labs also require a double-rinse procedure, first in tap water, then a quick rinse in deionised water to prevent mineral or calcium deposits, and while that step is often unavoidable for good reason, it highlights just how much room there is to reduce either the flow rate or the duration of each rinse. Think about how many times a day you rinse utensils or other lab items, then consider what even a modest reduction, ten percent less water each time, would add up to across a lab's daily routine.

What else is worth checking

Autoclaves are a major water user in their own right, a single large-autoclave cycle can pull several hundred litres, so batching loads rather than running them partially full reduces water use at the same time as it reduces energy use. Older equipment with once-through cooling, where tap water is used for cooling exactly once before going straight down the drain, is worth identifying and replacing with closed-loop recirculating systems where possible, since the water-use difference is dramatic. And it's worth checking reverse osmosis or ultrapure water systems are sized to actual daily demand rather than running continuously at full output regardless of use.

Why this is worth taking seriously now

Water scarcity is increasingly an operational risk as well as an environmental one, and institutions in water-stressed regions are already facing usage restrictions that directly affect how labs can run. Building water efficiency into normal lab practice now is considerably cheaper, and far less disruptive, than retrofitting for it later under pressure.