The Matosthèque: a tool for sharing scientific equipment within a laboratory

The Matosthèque of the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de physique

Since mid-2024, the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de physique (LIPhy, CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes) has been operating the Matosthèque, an online platform dedicated to sharing and providing access to scientific equipment within the lab. This user-friendly and secure tool allows any member of the lab to lend or borrow items with just a few clicks.

After one year of operation, the Matosthèque’s catalogue included nearly 230 items as of May 2025, with over 80 borrowings recorded. The types of equipment available are extremely varied: not only portable (e.g., conductivity meter, optical component) and non-portable (e.g., microscope, spectrometer) scientific instruments, but also consumables (e.g., Petri dishes, filters, chemicals), as well as non-scientific items (e.g., computer, drill, book).

While the sharing and availability of equipment existed well before laboratories began questioning their environmental footprint—often for budgetary reasons—the idea behind the Matosthèque was to make these practices easier, more widespread, and part of a broader sustainability effort. To assess its impact, it is possible to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions avoided through this system, based on the item's value listed in the catalogue.

A tool for all laboratories

To help spread these environmentally beneficial practices beyond the laboratory, the source code has been made available on GitLab, and the tool is offered for use by other laboratories. So far, six labs have contacted the tool’s administrators to explore deployment within their own units. The initiative has already attracted interest not only from physics labs in the Grenoble area but also from other disciplines (Biology, Earth Sciences & Astronomy, Engineering) and from labs located in other areas (Paris, Lyon, and Besançon).

The Reuse of Scientific Equipment: A Goal of the CNRS Sustainable Development Plan

Since the first carbon footprint assessment conducted at LIPhy in 2019, it has become apparent that more than 50% of the laboratory's greenhouse gas emissions are due to scientific purchases. This finding led its Commission Empreinte Environnementale to implement the Matosthèque. This predominance of purchases is also observed at the CNRS level, where purchases account for 85% of the organization’s total greenhouse gas emissions. When comparing the same scope as in 2019, a 3% increase in carbon emissions was observed between 2019 and 2022, mainly due to the rise in so-called “non-capitalized” purchases, such as consumables and laboratory instruments.

In early 2025, the CNRS published its first Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility Plan, which notably calls for the development of "the pooling and reuse of equipment within the higher education and research (ESR) sector, particularly in the most impactful purchasing segments." One of the CNRS's key structural actions is the deployment of solutions for sharing inventories of materials, consumables, and equipment at the level of laboratories and research sites.

The Issue of Purchasing at CNRS Physics

As part of its Sobriety Task Force, CNRS Physics has set up a thematic working group on "Purchasing and Maintenance", made up of nine volunteer Sustainable Development contacts from physics units. The group is co-led by Denis Morineau (Scientific Delegate for Research Infrastructures at CNRS Physics) and Salima Rafaï (Scientific Delegate for Sustainable Development at CNRS Physics). The group has been meeting monthly since March 2025 and is submitting a working document this month to the institute's Sobriety Task Force. It proposes ways to translate the objectives and pathways outlined in the CNRS master plan into concrete actions that reflect the specific characteristics of the physics.

To carry out its work, the thematic group is taking into account actions and reflections already undertaken in physics laboratories. Several physics units have developed—or expressed interest in developing—tools for lending lightweight equipment locally (at the scale of a laboratory or campus). Denis Morineau emphasizes the importance of scaling up good practices from laboratories, such as the Matosthèque or the Magasin de l’Institut Néel: “Several physics units have implemented initiatives like equipment loan systems, centralized purchasing stores, maintenance training, or experiment-wide impact assessments, all of which are valuable ideas that contribute to our thinking on how to roll them out on a larger scale.”