Cell Culture Products Designed for Sustainability

Enabling sustainability in your cell culture workflow

Maintaining healthy cells is the key to experimental success and reproducible research results. To give you confidence in your cell cultures, the Gibco, Thermo Scientific Nunc, and Invitrogen cell culture products featured here keep your cells healthy while helping to reduce your lab’s environmental impact.

 

Our cell culture greener products can help advance sustainability in the lab by minimizing the use of hazardous chemicals, minimizing waste and material consumption, and increasing energy efficiency.  With sustainable product design in mind, we ensure all greener product claims are transparently documented. For each of our greener cell culture products here, you will find the green fact sheets that explain and substantiate the greener product claim(s).

Explore more sustainable cell culture solutions

Select the workflow steps below to view relevant cell culture reagents, instrumentation, and analytical tools to support your sustainability goals.

More sustainable products for cell culture

These cell culture products enable the preparation, growth and harvesting of healthy cells safely, consistently, and reliably.

More energy efficient with BenchStable Media

Gibco BenchStable Media have more sustainable packaging and help promote more efficient use of energy by reducing the need for cold storage compared to traditional media.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Stable at room temperature—No need to refrigerate means it is ready when you need it. Store it anywhere in your lab.
  • Light protection—Bottles provided in protective packaging to reduce risk of light exposure—no more wrapping bottles in foil.
  • Easy to use—Available in DMEM, DMEM/F12, MEM, and RPMI 1640. Direct replacement when supplemented with 10% FBS, allowing for direct substitution in current protocols.
     

Reduce environmental impacts with TrypLE reagents

Gibco TrypLE dissociation reagents are used to detach cells from a growth surface (e.g., plastic flask). TrypLE enzymes provide efficient cell detachment with a lower environmental impact.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less packaging waste—TrypLE is stable during ambient shipping so no need for shipping in coolers and dry ice.
  • Save energy—TrypLE is stable at room temperature so no need for frozen storage.
  • Save time and use less plastic—No need to aliquot into smaller tubes and store in the freezer like trypsin.
  • Animal origin–free (AOF)—No animals are farmed to manufacture TrypLE as compared to trypsin which comes from pigs.
  • For when you take your research to the clinic Gibco CTS TrypLE Select is available.

More energy efficient with GlutaMAX Supplement

Gibco GlutaMAX Supplement is used in cell culture as an alternative of the essential amino acid L-glutamine. Enables extended cell growth and viability by minimizing toxic ammonia build-up and has a lower environmental impact than L-glutamine.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less packaging waste—GlutaMAX supplement remains stable during ambient shipping so no need for coolers and dry ice.
  • Save energy—GlutaMAX supplement is stable at room temperature so no need for frozen storage.
  • Save time and use less plastic—No need to aliquot GlutaMAX supplement into smaller plastic tubes and store in the freezer like L-glutamine.
  • For when you take your research to the clinic Gibco CTS GlutaMAX supplement is available.

Less waste with One Shot FBS

Gibco One Shot FBS is an aliquot-free solution to minimize contamination and save time.  One Shot FBS also provides significant plastics savings reducing the environmental impact of cell culture.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less plastic waste—Gibco One Shot FBS uses less plastic than purchasing a 500 mL bottle and aliquoting yourself.
  • Reduce disposal costs—Creating less plastic lab waste can reduce disposal costs and contribute to your sustainability goals.

Sustainable packaging with reusable rack

Nunc polypropylene conical tubes are premium, high-quality conical tubes that are sterile and ready for use in cell culture workflows.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less waste—traditional EPS rack for tubes replaced with reusable plastic rack; waste volume is reduced by 75–77%.
  • Recyclable tube rack—packaging and plastic rack are recyclable; plastic rack reduces risk of contamination from EPS particles and eliminated hard to recycle EPS waste.
     

Less waste with Edge 2.0 Plates

Nunc Edge 2.0 96-Well Plate is designed to minimize evaporation of cell culture medium from the plate and the risks associated with the “edge effect” that may occur on a standard 96-well plate.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Improved productivity—helps to reduce the rate of overall plate evaporation to <2% and yield consistent, viable cells across the entire 96-well plate.
  • Less waste and use of fewer resources—Nunc Edge 2.0 plates contain less source material than other suppliers’ plates, which means less waste to manage in the lab.


 

More energy efficient with Lab Armor Beads

Lab Armor Beads are made of a metallic alloy and comprise non-uniform metal beads designed to replace water in a water bath.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Eliminates biocides—liquid disinfectants used for water bath maintenance are harmful to the environment. Periodic use of 70% ethanol is all that is required to keep Lab Armor™ Beads clean and contamination-free.
  • Highly recyclable—formed from ultra-pure, recyclable material.
  • More energy efficient—at 37°C, Lab Armor Beads consume one half of the energy used by a traditional water bath. Set at 65°C, Lab Armor Beads consume less than one quarter of the energy required by water.

More sustainable products for cell modification

More sustainable packaging with Lipofectamine reagents

Invitrogen Lipofectamine 2000, 3000, MessengerMAX, and RNAiMAX reagents are cationic-lipid transfection reagents formulated for superior transfection efficiencies on a variety of cell types.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • High efficiency—Lipofectamine reagents offer you the ability to consistently transfect many cell types with high efficiency and exceptional ease of use.
  • Most referenced—choose these reagents due to their wide acceptance as the best and most reliable available. Since launching in 1993, Invitrogen Lipofectamine reagents have become the most referenced transfection reagents with over 50,000 citations.
  • Responsibly packaged—ships at ambient temperatures, reducing the environmental impact of cold shipping.

More sustainable products for detection

Selectively target cell subpopulations, discrete molecules or biological processes with these greener products for the detection step of your cell culture workflow.

Less waste with the Countess reusable slide

Invitrogen Countess 3 Automated Cell Counters provide highly accurate and precise brightfield and fluorescence cell counts even for challenging cell sample types. The Countess Reusable Slide is a greener, cost-efficient alternative to disposable slides.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Greener and cost-efficient—even if your lab uses only a few slides per day, you can reduce cost and generate less waste per year with the reusable slide.
  • Ease of use—slide has two chambers to count one sample in duplicate or two different samples. Only 10 µL of sample mixed with 10 µL of trypan blue is needed for a brightfield count.

 

Less hazardous with Click-iT reagents

Invitrogen Click-iT and Click-iT DIBO reagents support in vivo and in vitro detection and labeling of nucleic acids, proteins/peptides, and other small biomolecules for the monitoring of biological viability and activity. 
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Eliminates exposure to radiation—Click-iT and Click-iT DIBO reagents harness click-chemistry technology to enable detection with sensitivity similar to that of radioactivity, without the use of radioisotopes.
  • Eliminates need for hazardous metal catalysts—Leveraging biorthogonal chemistry, Click-iT and Click-iT DIBO reagents eliminate the need for the hazardous Cu(I) and Cu(II) metal catalysts, thus reducing disruptions to the normal chemistry of the cell. 

More sustainable products for cell analysis

Process and observe samples for accurate and robust experimental data on multiple platforms.

Less hazardous with ProLong and SlowFade reagents

Invitrogen ProLong and SlowFade reagents minimize the destructive effects of intense imaging light.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less hazardous—does not contain sodium azide, a preservative, which is very toxic to humans and to the aquatic environment, as well as reactive and potentially explosive.
  • Responsibly packaged—formulated for room temperature stability, there is no longer a need to ship on dry ice in EPS coolers. Ambient shipping conditions reduces our environmental footprint.
  • More energy efficient—ambient temperature storage of reagents is one of the keyways to reduce energy usage in the lab. 

Less hazardous with CellInsight HCA platform

The Thermo Scientific CellInsight family of HCS/HCA platforms offers widefield, confocal, or brightfield automated imaging modes, all within one protocol.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less hazardous—EurekaScan Finder is a “seek-and-find” feature that helps automate the identification and subsequent capture of irregularly seeded biological samples at progressively higher magnifications. This reduces the number of samples to be prepared and the corresponding hazardous materials for fixing and labeling the samples.
  • Less waste and fewer resources—Using the EurekaScan Finder reduces the number of 96-well plates required for screening campaigns.

Less hazardous with Attune Flow Cytometer

Invitrogen Attune Flow Cytometers offer uniquely powerful acoustic focusing technology that helps avoid clogging and enables sample flow rates up to 10X faster than hydrodynamic focusing alone.
View Green Fact Sheet.

  • Less hazardous—Attune Flow Cytometers generate less biohazardous waste per run due to low sheath fluid usage.
  • Less waste—Conventional instruments will generate up to 20 L of biological waste per run, whereas the Attune cytometer will generate only 1-2 L of biological waste per sample run. Overall, this means less biohazardous waste to manage and dispose of in the lab.

 

From design to end of product life, we are developing more sustainable solutions to help laboratories impact the world in all the right ways.

Resources & support

Resources

Cell Culture & Transfection Learning Center

Access cell culture and transfection educational resources for better experiment planning and execution.

 

Gibco Cell Culture Basics
Learn the fundamentals of cell culture for achieving consistent results, including laboratory setup, safety, and aseptic techniques.

 

Media Formulation Tool

Find the right Gibco media formulation for DMEM, DMEM/F-12, MEM, and RPMI-1640 media.

Support

Cell Culture & Transfection Support Center

Find technical support recommendations for your cell culture and transfection workflows, including tips for experimental setup and in-depth troubleshooting help.

 

Need technical support?
Contact our expert team for technical and application support of laboratory products.

Innovative Cell Biology Solutions

Intended use of the products mentioned on this page vary. For specific intended use statements please refer to the product label.