The Optimist magazine - June 2021

The Optimist is a journal for PhD students by PhD students. We bring out a new edition every four months discussing a whole range of topics such as how to deal with publication pressure and tips on how to live a happy PhD.

This is the cover I made for the issue released on June 2021, about sustainability in laboratories. I thought it could be an interesting idea to mix representations of nature and wet-lab sciences in the same illustration. Reinventing the all famous sentence 'money does not grow on trees', which already showcases an example of lack of sustainability of a certain practice, I decided to graphically say that our precious plastic supplies do not grow on trees. The tree is growing out of only one of the lab waste containers, which happens to be the only one that does not exist yet: the recycling container.

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