 All right. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Roxy and I'm the chair of the AIC Sustainability Committee and I'm joined with another member of the AIC Sustainability Committee, Kate. And we're here today to discuss the topic of life cycle assessments, otherwise known as LCA's, and how they can be useful in the cultural heritage field. This is something that we've been thinking a lot about as a committee, you know, what is our responsibility as conservators and preservation specialists to the environment. And more importantly, how and where do we find these resources to make good decisions. So we are very, very grateful to be joined by an awesome panel today who are collaborators on an FAIC NEH funded project called the life cycle assessment. I think it's called the project. You guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's to create a library for conservation materials. So they are going to have a more in depth kind of technical webinar on February 11 at noon and that's going to be hosted by FAIC. So please stay tuned for that and join us. But today's discussion is just going to be a little bit more general about how LCA's work and why they're important. So let me introduce our panel we have Sarah Nunberg who is principal of the objects conservation studio and a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute. We have Sarah Sutton who is principal at Sustainable Museums and the cultural sector lead in We Are Still In which is an awesome project as well. Matthew Echelman who is the associate professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, and Sarah Sanchez who is a doctoral student at Northeastern and a researcher for the project. So thank you all again for joining us. It's really exciting. So we have, as you can probably all see a few Sarah's so we're going to try to direct our questions specifically using last names even though it's a little formal but to try to keep confusion to a minimum. So I'll kick it off and then I'll hand it over to Kate. So I think it'd be great if we could just start with an introduction to the concept of LCA's and how that can be helpful to conservators. So perhaps Sarah Sanchez, if you could start with maybe a little bit about the concept and then Sarah Nunberg as a conservator be great if you could speak to that second part of the question. Sure. Actually, I'm going to pass this question to Matt to give you guys a good overview. And then Sarah can take it on the conservator side. Okay, so in general, LCA, Life Cycle Assessment is a quantitative tool for measuring sustainability. If you had to say it in one word, one sentence, that's how you put it. So it's based on measuring emissions and measuring resource use water and materials and looking at these over the life cycle of a product so that we don't have myopic view about environmental impacts and how we affect the environment. So for example, if you drive a car you might think, oh, all that matters is the emissions that come out of the tailpipe of this car but there are emissions associated with when you manufacture the car, when you dispose of the car and it gets shredded up and auto shredder residue and all sorts of things that we don't actually see most of the time as consumers. But that are part of the life cycle and are part of what make a green or not green product. So by quantifying these and uncovering these interactions with supply chain and with end of life, we can get a holistic view of the sustainability of a product or a process. And that applies to all sorts of different products LCA has been used all over industry and thousands and thousands of different products, but it hasn't been applied that much to the conservation area, even though there are some really significant environmental concerns. So that's why it's been a wonderful collaboration between all the people that are part of this project and all the people who have helped. So I'll hand it over to Sarah Nunberg to talk about professional aspects of it. Thanks Matt. As a conservator, we work with so many materials, especially solvents and I guess for me, earlier on when I was on the sustainability committee, I always wanted to have answers to how I could work in a more sustainable way and I would make choices like reaching for using steam so that I could use less solvent when the object could with staying using the steam treatment or picking one solvent over another, or a detergent cleaning system instead of a solvent. But I, knowing that maybe it's better from my health, but what is it doing environmentally. And it would just be me making kind of blind guesses to things that I thought would be intuitive. And then when I learned about life cycle assessment. We started doing analyses. I started learning that some of the things that you think intuitively might not really come out with the same answer that you think. And you might end up doing more that make having a larger impact with your what you thought was a more sustainable choice. But because we use so many products and so many so many virgin products and including solvents including plastics and paper products. And this, this tool can really help us in making educated choices. And, and any time that I'm doing a treatment where I'm taking the time to do to work with Matt and his students to do an LCA it means that I'm thinking through the treatment more. So then I'm coming out with a more thoughtful treatment. And so it's helpful on so many ways and just one other thing is that LCA focuses on materials and really breaking down every part of a material, which is what conservators do. That's what our focus is. And so the two do overlap in that way. And we love learning about what materials are made of. So that's one natural fit. I really love that picture. And also just your concise description, Matt was super helpful and like kind of have a big idea but that's, that's very helpful. So, obviously this is a really big deal and a really big project. I love it if you could take us through sort of what prompted this research you kind of touched on it it sounds like Sarah, but a little bit more about kind of how you came together as a group to collaborate and how long the project has been in the works. Sarah Sutton, if you want to weigh in on that and maybe Sarah Nunberg as well. I'll let Sarah Nunberg start and then follow her because she's really the spark that created this. So, back when I was chair of the sustainability committee, and it was the first year that we were really trying to get some make some inroads in the, in the AIC annual meeting, and the only thing that they were letting us do we were going to have a sustainability and we were trying to get them, even just to cut down on the amount of paper that they were putting out in the, in the bags that they were giving to everybody. And we have kind of a whole list of ways that that we could make the meeting more sustainable and each one for some whatever reason they did they wouldn't let us do. So we really wanted the meeting to also be held virtually, which we knew would never happen and, and we knew eventually one day it would happen but so little did we know what would make. Right and now now we're all saying, Oh, can we go back. That's super interesting though that it kind of came out of that yeah. So part of that I was, I wanted, we were having this luncheon and I wanted to have a speaker about about something sustainable and something that really could make a change beyond recycling plastic bottles, and I learned about life cycle assessment. And I started calling around and I was connected with Matt just from just asking every single person I could and I was told to call the Yale School of Forestry which I did and I said, Oh yes I have a name for you. And I was connected with Matt and so he came and spoke at in Albuquerque. And after that we started doing some case studies together. And Pam Hatchfield is very interested in the work, and she was great because she provided us with some actual case studies at at the MFA. So it was a great collaboration between the three of us where we did the first three case studies based on some issues at the MFA. So that's how it started. And then I believe Sarah that you and Matt did a webinar for AIC. And that's how I first came across you. So I had been writing for a little bit about sustainability in the cultural sector in the museum field. And was having to adopt and adapt a lot of practices from other industries and try and get the museum sector to apply them. And the American Alliance of Museums was having sort of the same response that AIC was to Sarah's committee's request. Great idea. Don't understand it. Not sure it fits our mission. We'll think about it another time. And so the work was really pretty hard at the beginning. And then out of the blue I got an invitation from the Australian Registrar's Committee to write an article for their journal on collections care and sustainability because they had the same interest and were grasping for materials and ideas. And so in my research I attended this webinar. And when they were done talking about LCA, I called Sarah up and I said, Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. It's the kind of advancement we need to explore in our field, because if we don't center the work in what we know and believe and in our mission, then some outside force is going to impose that on us eventually. We don't want to play by their rules. We want to bring our values and our rules into the discussion and adapt those practices. And so finding a way to fund this research so that Sarah and Matt could do more of it and make it so much easier for the rest of the sector to adopt was really my goal because we can't figure this out ourselves. We don't have time. It requires a mix of talent from the materials engineers as well as the conservators. It's all, it requires more than just one person to solve. And so we needed a bigger project. Oh, that's so inspiring. I'm going to hand it over to Kate because you have some more detailed questions about these sort of what we're just getting into so. So Matt, you touched on this a little bit. And this is a question for Sarah Sanchez and for Matt, whoever wants to take it. But you touched a little bit, Matt, about the types of environmental damage that LCA is taken to account. Can you talk a little bit more in detail about the types of damage that you're thinking about and also how you quantify that to then decide what material or or tool or product is better than another. Maybe I'll go first. I'll hand it over to Sarah too. So, it's a great question. The class I teach on LCA basically takes a whole semester to go through exactly how this all works. But to give you a condensed version, it's really important that we consider more than one type of environmental impact. And I always joke that I could create a really low carbon product that would kill all of us. Right. We need to be careful that we're balancing different types of environmental impacts that we're not imposing damages on people's health or ecosystem health while we're trying to solve some other environmental issues. One of the main features of LCA is that it's multi criteria. It looks at climate change. It looks at the ozone hole. It looks at ecosystems and biodiversity. And it tries to be holistic in the way it considers environmental impact. We have a long history of doing LCA in this country on more than 50 years now. And over time, the US EPA has developed some guidance and tools for us all to use. And one of the things that they have developed is a list of recommended types of environmental impacts. And they use a tool and it's free to use. Anyone can go ahead and download it. It's called Tracy with an eye. And it lists all the different types of environmental impacts, including some of the ones I mentioned. And it also tells you exactly how to measure them in carbon dioxide equivalents in nitrogen equivalents if we're talking about types of water pollution and so on. The categories have been developed over time and there's been some consensus about that. And then actually how you go about measuring it is a whole procedure and I'll hand it over to Sarah to tell you more about that. So I guess I lost my train of thought. A little bit more about kind of how they're quantified in terms of if one is more harmful than the other. That's a big question and a lot in terms of where kind of modeling and the modeler preferences come into play. This is where in LCA we can do something called waiting, which is basically like you would do in any other industry where you kind of come up with a decision matrix and you decide how important each category is. And that would allow you to come up with an overall score. Similar to how you could make decisions for kind of anything else in your life in which you have two things that can't really be compared whether you know if you're buying something for your house and some things more expensive but you like the way it looks better. You know you have to figure out how to make that decision. I mean obviously these are a little more important than you know how things look in your house, but it all kind of plays into the same way that we make decisions. And that's why LCA is so great is that it's a really useful decision making tool and it provides us this whole different lens through which we're able to make decisions that take all of these different factors into account. Thank you both that it's just, it's really really interesting to hear all of this. Sort of as a follow up to that. And maybe this is a question for Sarah Sanchez since we emailed about this a little bit. But we hear a lot about plastics and plastic pollution in particular and a lot of people who feel like they're trying to make the best most informed and sustainable decisions, you know try to avoid purchasing plastic. But I've actually read some LCAs in which plastic actually has less of an environmental impact than a lot of other materials that we think of as being more recyclable and more reusable. Can you just talk a little bit about why that is the case. So to start, you know, like Sarah Nunberg was talking about earlier. You know, our intuition isn't a good enough framework, you know for making a decision so a lot of the times we think that single use plastics aren't the best decision or are not the most environmentally effective. But it really all depends on how you end up using a product and how long you use it for. And that's really where a lot of these single use versus reusable and recyclable the conversation comes into play. You know a lot of people see it whether you're looking at paper plastic bags or the cotton ones. You know single use water bottles versus metal ones. Right so a lot of those products that are meant to be reused are much more product and material and process intensive right takes a lot of more energy and material to make a metal water bottle. So if you make a metal water bottle and you buy it and right and you use it for years right you use it hundreds of times use it thousands of times. That's when you really start to see the benefit of those materials. If you buy the metal water bottle and then you leave it on the train or you leave at school or it gets stolen in your backpack, or you know you drop it and the, you know the cap breaks and you like can't use it anymore. You know that's where the benefits don't weigh out right you know I have like tons of reusable bags and so many of them sit in my closet. So if they sit in my closet for the rest of my life until I move and then I like throw them out you know, then it wasn't really worth it I could have just a paper bag or a plastic bag. Right so that's a lot of the times where we see this kind of disconnect between what we what we expect to see the results for single use forces, you know products that are meant to be used multiple times. So, that's, that's kind of my answer on that. I don't know if Matt has anything else to add. I would just add that context is really important than the boundary of the system you're looking at. There was a great LCA. Some time ago, and the title was paper or plastic. Who cares. How did you get to the store. And, you know, we're so focused on this individual choices, we kind of miss the big picture of what consumption means. And what is, what is the whole picture of our activity. So, lots of these little choices are meaningful and people have very valid questions about them. And there are so many choices we have to make, especially professional capacity. But seeing the big picture and understanding the magnitude of those choices, relative to everything else that's going on. And that's also a really useful thing to keep in mind. That that's so interesting and really helpful and sort of connects a little bit to my next question, which is, I guess a general question but maybe Matt or Sarah Sanchez you can address it a little bit. Although if anyone knows the answer please feel free to chime in but are there any other tools out there. For those of us who are interested in thinking about, you know, making these decisions and trying to make them the most sustainable that, you know, that you would recommend for us. Just because so many of these, you know, the decisions that we're trying to make are, you know, I guess we can't really always trust our intuition, unfortunately. Well, we're going to have a tool for you pretty soon here, which it covers, you know, many hundreds of different types of products used in the conservation field. As I think Sarah mentioned, this is such an interdisciplinary field that depending on your question, you'll have different experts who have created tools to help you. So, I think the first step for anybody in the United States should be the US EPA site on lifecycle assessment. There are some good documents you can read. And they've also set up some really useful tools. I think one of the most useful ones is about waste management. A lot of people have questions about what's the benefit of recycling, what's the benefit if I reuse or compost or something. And they have this tool called the warm model is in stay warm, and you can use it it's free it's very simple spreadsheet model, and you can tell exactly depending on what you what you're throwing out what the best way of dealing with it. So, that's just an example on the waste management side, but EPA has several tools. But we wanted to create in this project one that was really specific to the conservation. Yeah, and I guess in my question which I didn't clarify was like in our non professional lives like so I guess in our personal lives if there's anything but Matt you did. You did touch on that beautifully so thank you. Well if you want to have fun exercise. It's always interesting to go to the site called environmental footprint. And it's a lifecycle based tools, it's carbon footprint, plus a lot of other types of resources we use. And, and that'll give you a nice picture it's it's very simple and more tailored to personal personal. I sort of a follow up to that is there any talk this might be completely inappropriate for this conversation but I'm just curious is there any talk of having this as almost like you would on food like nutrition facts is there any talk of having like any object that you buy, have an LCA done. Does anyone know. Sorry. You mean any object that you buy, sort of like any any consumer product so like a car would have one and you know bag of chips at the grocery store like is that something that there's kind of government for support for as anyone heard of that or is this completely way too big for right now. It's been a vision for a long time. So, there are some sectors where there's a lot of progress on that. If you're in the buildings and construction sector. Many, many materials you buy have what's called an environmental product declaration, or EPD, and that and you can look up it's like a mini LCA attached to the product. And that's become really, really common. There are some other tools where you can actually go around it's an app, and you can scan a barcode in the grocery store. It'll spit out kind of basic score about health and environment and social issues. But it's more kind of qualitative. We are not to the point where we can count specific, you know, quantitative measures of carbon emissions, for example, for every single product in a in a high resolution way. But people have been working on that, and especially industry has been working very, very hard for nine years. So, not there yet. And there's some, there's some questions about how useful would that be, you know, to the general public. You know, you go to go to the store you look at the serial box it says 0.6 kilograms of CO2 equivalent. We need basic education on what that means, and some context before we can really have it be useful. So, and I have a related example would be energy scorecards increasingly required for buildings. So your city code might have a requirement that if your museum is over 50,000 square feet, it needs to have a reporting mechanism and maybe a publicly visible reporting mechanism for your energy consumption. A baby step towards that kind of work. I do feel very strongly that within the next 10 years this kind of measuring and reporting will become quite common. The question just that Matt alluded to is, will that literacy, all our literacy in understanding and weighing that information keep up with it. So the corollary example would be right now in the COVID-19 crisis, when CDC changed recommendations from don't wear PPE, which was really because we need it for the health care providers to okay now everyone wear it some people interpreted that as they didn't know what they were doing. But they knew more the conditions the context changed. And so the instructions changed. That's happening now with the vaccine roll out. It's that same sort of evolution of understanding research communicating to the public that will evolve over time. And people have to. Well, someplace, everyone has to develop the literacy in science and interpreting information in order to manage that well. And so in doing this LCA project, not just the tool, not just the LCA library examples, but the whole package of how to use this information is built into it, educating the professionals on how to use this most appropriately. And what we don't know yet, what we still need to work on is equally important, just dropping it on their desks, beaming it to their computers isn't as won't be as effective as we want it to be. Very helpful and I'm really excited to hear that that's a 10 year potential. I think I'm myself being a total nerd about this kind of thing sitting there in the grocery store I'm always kind of making irrational decisions like I'm going to buy the organic one that's not in plastic because you know and I'm like it'd be great if I had a number to basis. So thank you for your insight. And to kind of, you know, carry on with that part of the conversation. Sarah Sutton. I think government sort of intervention and, and government sort of how they can help us get to a better place and something that I spoke with some folks in Canada and out of Europe and they were talking about conservators who are bidding for government contracts actually started to include a sort of, however, however rough estimate of environmental impact so I'm wondering, I mean that's not I don't, for my understanding anything that we do here in the United States but I'm wondering if that's something that you all have thought about or if there's a way maybe pass her number you can weigh in this as well that we as conservators to kind of like loop this into our ethical thinking, or what the vision is I guess for that. And influence. So your examples of Canada and Europe are settings where the government sets more standards and leads, and that is not usually the case here. And especially not on environment and climate until six days from now. So, instead the field can influence things. So, if you were to look at the superpower museum leaders today on sustainability, they would spec sustainability standards into a contract for food services for building for delivery. And conservators can offer that to clients who are trying to choose them, and institutions can specify some sort of recognition of environmental approach from conservators who are working for them so the field could influence them. And I think that we're still in the area where private clients. And I don't even know, you know, if you're working for a museum, but when you're putting forward a proposal and if you say and we're going to work with the most sustainable goals in mind they're going to say yeah but that's going to take longer and that's going to be more expensive and we really don't care. So, even if I do this work in that way, I will not tell my clients, even if I think that it's going to it could be it should be a selling point even if I'm putting in a bid for say a big university or something where you would think they would use it. I know that if they see anything that they think is going to up the cost or increase the amount of time. They don't care. They may talk as if they care, but when it comes down to dollars they anything so I will, I do it on my own but I And it's not it's not going to cost them more they don't understand that. Well that's stealth green. There's a lot of stealth green, it has value and I look forward to the day where we don't need to use still. Yeah, that's a great, great term. And yeah that's that's disheartening and interesting at the same time to hear that that perspective so thanks for sharing that. So maybe on a, well on the similar note I guess maybe we've already kind of touched on this I always like to ask. I like to ask me gritty questions and I also like to ask kind of big picture questions because I feel like a lot of us get stuck around these issues, just not knowing where to find inspiration and where to expect challenges so I'm curious if you could speak to kind of, you know, what has been unanticipated frustrations of this project but also what a kind of combined these two questions you know what is really exciting and maybe moving faster than you than you expected. And anyone can take this who feels like it. I can start this last year. What we didn't expect was coven, of course, like everybody. And so it made it so we couldn't all get together we were all supposed to get together in Salt Lake and we were going to have a workshop. So we ended up doing everything virtually which was great because it reduced our carbon footprint. But the gift that it gave us was a whole bunch of conservation students from the programs who were supposed to be going all over the world and we're supposed to have these great summer experiences. And they were left without them. So we were, we put out a call because we have a lot of professional peers on our, in our grant. And we asked them if any of their students would be interested in working with us. And they came up, we needed, we wanted case studies we needed case studies for the library. We had these amazing students who could come up with case studies and those are the case studies that are going to be in our library that we are that we are developing. And so that was a great surprise and a great gift to this project that that continues to be giving over and over again. The, the drawback is we have a lot of case studies now, and it takes a long time to get them all done. So we have a lot of work, but we've they're all, you know, the students did an amazing job with sitting with us and discussing it and putting together the goal and the scopes of the projects and they developed the inventories and just a way that is just just wonderful. So so that was a great, a great surprise and a great. It really started off the project in a way that we didn't expect. We ended up focusing. They also contributed a lot to the tool we have a spreadsheet with over 2000 items, specific to conservation to cultural heritage preservation. So it's not just conservation. And they helped us organize it and they helped us. Each item needs really to be have a link to the product manufacturer and so that then Sarah can use that to model each each item. So they helped us begin that we still have a lot of work left on it, but they also began that work on the tool. There's still a lot of work, more work left on the tool. I think that we didn't realize how much work would be left with this spreadsheet. We had done a tier one project, a research and development project. So we had already realize what some of the surprises would be. So we knew that it would be hard to get case studies. So we knew that it would be we would need other conservators and other professionals to help us with that. So we knew that we knew we needed items for the tool so we already had reached out to figure out how to get those items on the tool. So that helped us a lot. Others want to contribute say something. I'll chime in as the non scientist in the family here. So my background is museum administration and environment and climate work. And so what I'm fascinated by is the challenge of learning to let go of thinking in a linear manner. Museum folks are trained up to create the strategic plan. What is the series of steps that we take? What's your logic model? And the LCA is not like that. It's a systems approach which requires being able to think in multiple scales, multiple, I don't know what the proper word is, phases. You know, it's a very different kind of thinking, which requires us to relax and let the research do its work instead of trying to manage it. But then that's where the joy and the excitement is we are opening a door to new things we wouldn't be able to see otherwise. And this approach is, it feels a little bit like magic because it does pull back the curtain and you can see things work in ways that you didn't anticipate and you can't into it. And so that's been the most exciting part for me. And also that this is critical research. The museum field doesn't do enough research just in general, right. Because who gives us enough money for it. Thank goodness for any age for supporting this work. And being able to advance research in this way and encourage other people, regular folk, to identify questions and figure out a way to pursue answers and solutions to improve our practice. I think conservators are more likely to do that than many other sectors in the museum field, but it's worth celebrating and encouraging and that makes it delightful to be part of this team. Some really interesting, wonderful answers. I love this idea of systems thinking it reminds me of the research that's been done on trees and the roots talking to each other. Seems like a strange comparison but but yeah that's great I was actually cleaning out some jars the other day going through a whole bunch of solvents to try to save this glass jar and thinking to myself, I wish I had an LCA to tell me like, should I just throw this out or should I continue persevering with the acetone or whatever it was. Yeah, there you go, I'll be happy to give you all my mucky jars. I'll throw it over to Kate again, you've got a couple more questions. Okay. We touched on this a little bit, and I don't know if maybe we want to have maybe one, someone from the sort of conservation museum side answer this and then maybe Sarah Sanchez and Matthew, one of you could also answer it but where do you feel like we go from here, and then what kind of impact do you hope that this tool will have. So Sarah and I have been talking, Sarah Sutton and I have been talking a lot about this. We have, we have, I don't know if I can even say our goals but one main goal is education. We don't want this tool just to sit on the AIC website and no one use it. I know a lot of conservators are very, I know a lot of conservators are very non software oriented, and I can speak for myself in that I know that with that there are tools that have been put out there for conservators to help with different systems that have had a hard time taking off. So we have thought a lot about grants to apply for them. We're in the process of thinking about how to educate our colleagues, not just conservators but everybody in the people need to feel comfortable with going on the website, opening this up and using it. This will also very much depend on how we design it and we're working with Pratt communication design professor and his students so they're artists so they're designing what this is going to look like and how it's going to be used. And so that's very intentional. So it's so, so, so the next thing that we really are working on is educating people about LCA and about how to use this. We also have this big idea of going international but that's all we can really say of really getting because right now, the tool in the library are very focused. And we did this intentionally on materials that are used in the United States because this is an FAIC project but it's leaving out materials that are used all over the world. We would like this to be able to be used by people internationally, but that's in the future. Will it be available to only AIC members or will it be available to open? Okay. As far as I know, the goal is to make it available, it will be available on the AIC website. And I don't think you have to be a member to use it but I'm not sure about that. Matt or Sarah Sanchez, do you want to weigh in from your perspective? Sure, yeah, I, I think we're, you know, from our end we're just really excited to see another relevant application of LCA to kind of introduce new people and voices to what LCA is capable of and systems thinking processes. You know, and this is kind of what we really hope to do from our end, which is, you know, have LCA's that provide use and are that people can use to make better decisions. So, you know, I think that's, that's kind of how I've been thinking about it from my end. You know, I'm, this has been a fantastic project to work on. And such a great way to continue to learn more about LCA and about a field that I originally knew nothing about other than having previously visited museums. You know, sort of the extent of my knowledge about, you know, cultural cultural heritage preservation before this. And so I, it's a really great meeting I think of these two fields. I just want to add one thing is it's been an amazing education for me working with engineers. And I never ever thought I would be going this way. And the other thing has been that I, I, I suggest for all conservators is to understand systems boundaries and to understand what we're talking about with this because it, once you start thinking about it, you start thinking about it in terms of everything. And when you start thinking about it in terms of your treatments, whether it's preventive or invasive treatments, you start thinking, okay, what am I including and what am I not. And there's some great reading out there that really will change what you do change the way you think. I'm intrigued by that that last part there. So I think my final question and I think I have to give a caveat with this too, because I feel like we're talking a lot about decision making and, and sort of that puts a lot of attention on on the individual and one thing that I've really been thinking a lot about is how, when we really delve into this climate crisis if we're going to solve this climate crisis it really cannot come down to the individual so we really do need big change. But this is a question about, you know, individual choices that you all make in your lives. So, you know, how do you go about, you know, doing that in your day to day lives. And are there any resources and Matt you touched on this a little bit that you would recommend to those of us who are thinking about trying to make the most sustainable choices in our, in both our personal and professional lives. And maybe we can all think we can all try to answer this one. And maybe and I'm going to pick someone to go first so Sarah Sutton why don't you go first. I try and approach it by saying tell folks to let go of the guilt. Because the guilt just paralyzes you. And once you can do that, then you can say hey what are my particular skills, abilities and resources for knowledge in order to do decision making and choice making. And this is a resource for building your knowledge. The skills to understand how to make the choice is critical. But I'll, and I've done a great deal of work in my own life of trying to be more sustainable so just before we started recording this. The guy came to help me understand how my heat pump works in order because I have a new home in order to make it run as efficiently as possible. So that when somebody comes next week to give me solar panel plan. I have the most efficient system in order to size this is the panel appropriately. I wouldn't have known all of that was necessary, and I wouldn't have understood what they were telling me if I hadn't done the research. So all of us have a lot of research to do. Choose that area that honest to goodness makes you happiest or solves the problem you're most concerned about. But I have one caveat comment. I buy carbon offsets through the UN climate neutral now program. And so I measure my business and my family carbon footprint and then I purchase offsets using their certified approach. And when I was telling the UN officer about my decision and how I was making a socially responsible one. He pointed out that actually as delightful as the socially responsible approach was which actually gave women more time in their lives because they weren't collecting fuel. And we're in such a hurry to change climate impacts right now that the better choice is the one that has the greater reduction of carbon emissions. So from his point of view, that was the lever to be pulling. I came in with a social approach as well, and then I solved the problem by buying double the offsets. Everybody will make their own choices. And that was the information and what drove me to make those choices. Matt, do you want to go next? Sure. I'd really like to echo Sarah's point about getting over guilt. And especially as engineers and analysts, you know, we could just keep going and try to, you know, figure out the this question in great detail. I'm sure you've all heard this phrase, paralysis by analysis. This is a big danger for us. And the picture is never going to be complete. These systems are just so big and so complex. So, being willing to accept partial, being ready to make a decision based on that, that's a really necessary point. Another phrase I heard just recently was, it's a lot more impactful for many people to do a small thing than it is for a few people to be like perfect eco warrior types and, you know, 100%. So you have to be comfortable with the level of commitment or action that you want to take. And something I say in our group, Sarah knows this phrase quite well. I always say, you know, there's no such thing as a free lunch in environmental terms. We, as humans, we consume, right, and to live is to consume. And that consumption has impacts and those impacts are okay, that's normal. So what we're trying to do is make our impacts have the least impact, or the least deleterious negative effects on the environment to get back within our Earth's carrying capacity. So, whatever choices you're comfortable with, with the information you have, that's okay. Sarah Sanchez, would you like to go next? Sure. Yeah, I think everybody covered a lot of great points. I think one of the things that I try to do is just be mindful of like what enters my home and, you know, how long I use it for I try to be really mindful about clothes. It never like stops me from buying more clothes, but I at least try to wear them out before, you know, I get rid of them, and to, you know, find fabric recycling if it's available. You know, so it doesn't keep me, you know, I still buy things that, you know, it doesn't keep me from making any decisions at all. But once I have something I tried to use it until I can't use it anymore, or then maybe see if I can fix it or, you know, my dad can fix it. And then, you know, see, you know, and then go from there and just try to really be, you know, lifecycle assessment always reminds me to really be mindful of using something for its whole life cycle. Not just until, you know, I'm, I'm bored with it or I want something in a different color. So that's, that's kind of, that's kind of my, my approach to how it's, you know, help, how it helps me make kind of hopefully more sustainable choices. Sarah Nunberg, would you like to go next? All right, I have to be careful here because I could, I can go down a rabbit hole. As Matt said, I can preach. I can give you a whole list. I don't know. I, in my treatments, there are things I cut out that I don't use. There are, and I can give you, I don't know, I, we have solar panels. We got tax deductions for the solar panels. I live in a city. I bike everywhere as much as I can. We got a car. I really didn't want the car. My kids shop at the thrift store all the time, which is great, but now they have clothes everywhere because everything's so cheap at the thrift store. But it's great because I don't know the last time that, you know, there's some things they buy new because you just don't want to buy some things used but they buy. So they buy tons and tons and tons of clothes, but they're all like for a dollar each and they're all used. So that's great. And so I try, as Sarah said, I try and use something until I can't use it anymore, especially with computers and phones and stuff like that. I, we all, I, in my family, we circle, you know, if my computer's done, I give it to my daughter, then gives it to the next daughter. It's just the way. So, and try and keep a big picture because otherwise you go down a rabbit hole and you can't, you get paralyzed. I would love it if you would just share like two or three things that you definitely don't use in your treatment. Just a few, don't have to go down the rabbit hole. I really try not to use epoxy. I don't really have epoxy here. I have Hexal, but it's really old, so I probably shouldn't use it. I mean the solvents that I do use, I do use acetone and ethanol. I have them here. I have, and I have the modular cleaning program lined up, but there were a bunch that I didn't take during the, there were a whole bunch that I just didn't take, especially the silicone solvents. I wouldn't, I won't use those. And then, you know, again, with scalpels I use some, I have, you know, my used scalpels for used things that I can use them over and over again and then if I need one fresh. So those kinds of things. If I can use something besides cotton wool I do, you know, when do I really need new cotton wool? I reuse gloves like crazy. I don't think rags, I have, I use rags. I use, I use bottles, I reuse bottles. I don't buy bottles, I save them. So it's really when do you need something that clean and that new, or when can you reuse? I'm always thinking about that. But with the LCA we're looking at, you know, like, this can be a teaser for the, for the, for the webinar, you know, is, which is worse, as Matt would say. Blue board or cardboard, you know, non acidic, just regular old cardboard. So that kind of thing. Stay tuned to find out everyone. That was incredible. Just hearing kind of how you all think about this is just really inspiring. I'm, yeah, I'm really thankful to you all for joining us and for Kate to Kate for putting this together. I'm really excited for this webinar. It's going to be really good. I think it's just really nice to get some practical tips. I think we hear a lot. I mean, I'm a huge offender. I love inspiration. I love like thinking poetically about all of this, but it is also really nice to balance it out with some really practical science based knowledge. So, we're so grateful to you all for doing this work and for, you know, being so generous with your time to share it with everyone and, and we'd love to do whatever we can to help kind of spread the word about this amazing resource so. Yeah, thank you again for for joining us and if anyone has anything else to throw indicate if you wanted to say anything at the end. I wanted to echo the thank you. Because this is such an exciting project and I think it really is going to have such a really big impact on the field and then, again, if there's anything that the sustainability committee can do to like remind conservators that this is a tool that we have to use. I mean, you tell us were, you know, we're here to help. Yeah, just a huge thank you this was so nice to learn more about it and I'm I can't wait to use it. I'd like to give a shout out to FIC for being willing to take on a project. I tell people that curiosity, creativity and courage, those three things you need in order to do this kind of work. And not every institution has the courage to take an inquiry like this and give away one of their any age application slots to do this kind of research right. And they did they've been excellent partners now in a second grant to and it makes all the difference. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up again. That's funding is is so essential. As we well know in the cultural cultural heritage field. All right, well, I'm sorry. Thank you for your support for doing this. Yeah, thank you.