Laboratory safety is a fundamental prerequisite for scientific researcher to conduct research experiments effectively. Environmental laboratories, which support interdisciplinary research in areas such as wastewater treatment, air pollution control, environmental microbiology, and environmental chemistry, are particularly critical. These facilities play a vital role in developing graduate students’ practical, innovative, and scientific research competencies. In recent years, the continuous expansion of graduate enrollment has led to a corresponding increase in the scale of environmental research laboratories. Concurrently, the variety and quantity of hazardous reagents, such as trinitrophenol, trinitrobenzene, and nitrocellulose, have risen significantly. Improper management or non-compliance with operational protocols in these laboratories can result in serious safety and regulatory violations, potentially leading to accidents such as explosions, poisoning, burns, or fires. Given these risks, this study examines key issues in safety standardization and management within environmental graduate research laboratories, aiming to enhance operational safety and regulatory compliance.

There are many existed problems for the safety specification and management of environmental graduate scientific research laboratories in Guangxi University, including the lack of early laboratories planning, aging facilities and insufficient space. In addition, there are short of sufficient and dedicated laboratory safety staffs, which cause the graduate student tutors and graduate students are insufficient awareness of dynamic safety challenges in interdisciplinary research fields. Moreover, both these graduate student tutors and graduate students face heavy research tasks and cannot take sufficient time to rectify the safety problems in research laboratories. These above-mentioned reasons have brought various types, large quantities and difficult rectification of safety hidden troubles. Therefore, there are major problems in environmental graduate scientific research laboratories such as chaotic spatial zoning, incomplete safety management systems and poor effectiveness of safety education. In combination with the specific safety issues existing in the environmental laboratories of Guangxi University, three strategies and a series of practical safety management standards are proposed from the aspects of laboratory safety education and training. It mainly includes institutional guarantees, experimental reagents & equipment management, waste supervision & management. These specific measures include: safety regulation management Firstly, Guangxi University pays more attention to the flexibility and multi-functionality of laboratory layout; Secondly, our university continuously optimize safety measures including fire prevention, explosion prevention, and gas defense. Thirdly, the professional laboratory staffs regularly conduct laboratory safety regulations inspections every month, supervise teachers and students to strictly abide by the laboratory safety regulations management system.

Now Guangxi University has form a “standardization-implementation-inspection-rectification-recheck” safety management mode. Finally, we introduce digital supported management methods in the background of rapid technological development. Guangxi University has comprehensively improved the safety management level of environmental graduate scientific research laboratories: optimizing the functional space design of laboratories, establishing the digital safety standard management system and introducing high-quality hardware resources for scenario-based safety training such as intelligent management, virtual simulation, science popularization emergency scenario exercises and VR training.

The study provides a theoretical reference for improving the safety management system of research laboratories of environmental category, strengthening laboratory safety level and ensuring the property safety of teachers and students. These optimized safety standards management not only helps to ensure the safety of public property and teachers & students, but also serves as an important guarantee for promoting the in-depth development of scientific research. It can provide reference for the standardized construction and management of research laboratories in sister universities.