Caltech Opens "Green Labs ReStore" for Rehoming of Lab Supplies

A student juggles jars and beakers while perusing shelves. Researchers make several trips to load boxes of lab supplies onto rolling carts. Lab managers offer to donate supplies from their own labs.

The recent launch of Green Labs ReStore, Caltech's new in-person rehoming effort for laboratory supplies, was bustling with activity. Located in room 181 of the Alles Laboratory for Molecular Biology and spearheaded by the Institute's Green Labs group, the ReStore opened on November 19, 2025, as a space for the Caltech community to exchange new and gently used lab supplies.

Green Labs is a group run by Caltech Facilities' Sustainability department, and the ReStore is one of many pilot programs that Green Labs started in hopes of making labs more sustainable across campus. Before the ReStore was established, the Green Labs group hosted lab cleanups and supply rehoming efforts, but members were looking for a way to increase engagement with their work. The group started with an online version of what would become the ReStore in March 2025, when Vijaya Kumar, a research technician in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering (BBE) and a member of the Green Labs group, first enlisted the help of her daughter, Sarah Kumar, who was still in high school at the time, to create a website called the Caltech Green Labs Marketplace.

"The labs that were participating offloaded about $65,000 worth of items from March through August through the new website," says Tasha Cammidge, the Green Labs coordinator. "After we had this initial push where we had a lot of people donating things, a lot of people taking things, we could see it almost trickling off. I was just worried it would stop, so I thought to myself, ‘What if we used a physical space for this?'"

Cammidge remembered an earlier conversation she had with Joan Sullivan, the division operations officer for BBE, about a recently vacated space in Alles that used to be a stock room. She worked with BBE to secure the space and create a physical location for the lab supply rehoming efforts.

The ReStore is run primarily by student employees. Three undergraduate students—Aarohi Patel, Tuyako Khristoforova, and J.T. Tran—help manage the still ongoing Green Labs Marketplace site, organize the supply inventory, and calculate the saved costs of the ReStore's efforts, among other duties.

Patel, a second-year student majoring in electrical engineering, first got involved with Green Labs while doing a summer undergraduate research fellowship on lab energy consumption. She says she was immediately interested in supporting the ReStore's operations when the student positions were announced.

"I thought the idea of the ReStore was very cool—taking things that people don't usually use and putting them in a place where other people have access to them," Patel says. "It's a great method of recycling. I love that everything is free of cost and gives us the opportunity to save a lot of money across campus."

Cammidge reports that, on the first day of the ReStore's opening alone, 250 items were rehomed, saving more than $5,800 in costs to labs and diverting about 63 kilograms (138 pounds) of materials from a landfill. This single day of activity helped push the ReStore's cumulative internal-reuse savings to over $70,000, a total that continues to grow each week. In addition to these savings, the Green Labs group reports that the reuse encouraged by the ReStore's work can also help cut down on water/energy use, pollution, and emissions.

Cammidge and Kumar are encouraged by this strong start and hope to see the ReStore's impact continue to grow.

"The ultimate goal is to just reduce, reuse, and recycle, and keep that going for as long as we can," Kumar says. "This campuswide sustainability project started with BBE support, but if it can take hold in all other divisions and departments—not just labs—and be more visible to many more people, that would be great."