Experimentation Miniaturisation: Doing More with Less

In a previous Greening the Bench post, Rethink Before You Recycle: Tackling Lab Consumables Waste, we looked at how rethinking what we use can have a big impact on lab waste. This time, we’re taking that same mindset to the experimental scale itself, exploring how much can be saved, both financially and environmentally, by simply doing more with less.

Whether you’re preparing buffers, culturing cells, or running chromatographic analyses, there’s often room to scale down. Miniaturisation doesn’t just mean shrinking your setup, it means questioning whether the quantities we use are truly necessary. Every millilitre weighed, pipetted, or injected comes with an invisible footprint: raw materials, manufacturing, shipping, storage, disposal. By reducing these inputs, even modestly, we multiply the savings across every stage of an experiment’s life cycle.

Of course, depending on the work you’re doing, scaling down may require validation to make sure data quality and method performance remain robust. But in many cases, especially in research and method development, smaller volumes and shorter run times can deliver the same insight with a fraction of the cost, waste, and environmental burden.

Where miniaturisation makes a difference

Think about a few common lab scenarios:

💧 Chromatography

Shorter run times and optimised sample preparations can significantly reduce solvent use and waste, without compromising separation quality.

🧫 Cell culture

Smaller flasks or plates, shared media prep, and batch planning can cut plastic use and reduce the amount of consumables discarded each week.

⚗️ Buffer and reagent prep

Making only what’s needed for the next few days, rather than for the month, reduces chemical demand, storage needs, and expired waste.

📊 Routine assays and analyses

Trialling microplates or scaled down reaction volumes can maintain precision while saving on reagents, energy, and disposal costs.

Each of these changes might feel minor in isolation, but together they shape a culture of conscious experimentation, one where scientific integrity and resource efficiency coexist naturally.

Why this matters

Scaling down your experiments saves more than just materials. Every reduction in reagent, solvent, or consumable use also cuts the carbon associated with its manufacture, packaging, and transport. It reduces the frequency of deliveries, the amount of waste to dispose of, and even the energy needed for storage.

And the financial benefits are just as clear. Smaller experiments mean lower procurement costs, less waste to pay for, and more efficient use of limited lab space. Over time, those savings compound and free up budgets for the research itself, not what’s left over at the end of it.

Action of the Week:

Take one experiment or method you use regularly and ask: Could I do this at half the scale?

Even if the answer is “not yet,” the process of reviewing protocols with resource efficiency in mind can reveal unexpected opportunities to save. Start with something simple such as a buffer prep, a routine assay or a run time and see how small changes can add up to big impact.