CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: green lab

  • The carbon footprint of research: LEAF, My Green Lab and sustainable practice

    Research has begun to ask a question it long avoided: what does it cost the planet to do? Laboratories are among the most energy- and resource-intensive spaces on any university estate — a single ultra-low-temperature freezer can use as much electricity as a household — and the conduct of research generates emissions through equipment, consumables, computing, and travel. A practical movement has grown up to measure and reduce that footprint, and it now has recognised frameworks and certifications. This article surveys them, drawing on the sustainable-research domain.

    The accounting frame: scopes 1, 2 and 3

    Sustainable research starts, like all carbon work, with measurement, and the standard frame is the three scopes of greenhouse-gas accounting applied to research operations.

    • Scope 1 emissions are direct: those from sources the institution owns or controls — on-site combustion, certain laboratory gases.
    • Scope 2 emissions are indirect, from purchased energy: the electricity that runs the freezers, fume hoods, and instruments.
    • Scope 3 emissions are the wider indirect footprint: the embodied carbon in equipment and consumables, the emissions of suppliers, and — significantly for research — staff and conference travel.

    The reason this frame matters is that it locates the footprint honestly. For many research operations the largest single contributions are scope 2 energy (especially cold storage) and scope 3 travel and procurement. A carbon footprint of a research project that counts only the obvious on-site emissions and ignores the embodied carbon of equipment or the flights to a conference is not a footprint; it is a flattering fragment.

    LEAF: the framework built for labs

    Knowing the scopes is one thing; giving a working scientist concrete actions is another, and that is what LEAF — the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework — provides. Developed at University College London and now used by laboratories across many institutions, LEAF is a standards-and-actions framework that a lab works through to earn certification at Bronze, Silver, or Gold level.

    What makes LEAF effective is that it is specific and bottom-up. Rather than a high-level pledge, it gives a lab a checklist of concrete practices: ULT freezer optimisation (running freezers at -70°C rather than -80°C where the science allows, and maintaining them properly), fume-hood sash management (closing the sash to cut energy use), an equipment hibernation policy for powering down idle instruments, sample-storage rationalisation, and plastic reduction to cut single-use plastic, the dominant material burden of many wet labs. Each action is small; the aggregate across a research-intensive institution is not. LEAF also builds in a calculator so that a lab can estimate the financial and carbon savings of its changes, which turns sustainability from exhortation into measured outcome.

    My Green Lab: certification and the supply chain

    Running in parallel, and increasingly international, is My Green Lab, a non-profit whose My Green Lab certification assesses laboratory sustainability across a wider band of levels, from Bronze through to Platinum. My Green Lab covers similar operational ground to LEAF — energy, water, waste, procurement — but it has been particularly influential on the supply side, through its work rating the environmental impact of laboratory products and equipment. That matters because a great deal of a lab’s footprint is scope 3, embodied in the things it buys, and shifting procurement toward lower-impact products is one of the higher-leverage moves available. The two frameworks are not rivals so much as complementary entry points; many institutions encourage one or the other, and some use both.

    The parts a certification can miss

    An honest account has to note where the easy wins run out. Two contributions to the research footprint sit awkwardly inside lab-focused certifications and deserve naming in their own right.

    The first is research travel. Flight emissions from conference and fieldwork travel are, for many researchers, the single largest component of their professional carbon footprint, and they fall under scope 3 rather than under anything a bench checklist controls. Conference-travel decarbonisation — virtual and hybrid formats, regional hubs, train-first policies — is a cultural change at the level of the discipline and the funder, not the individual lab.

    The second is compute. Compute energy consumption, and in particular the carbon cost of training large AI models, is a fast-growing and often-invisible part of the research footprint. A computation’s energy and carbon can be measured and recorded — the same energy consumption record and carbon emissions estimate that belong in a reproducibility package double as sustainability data — and carbon-aware scheduling can shift heavy jobs to times and places where the grid is cleaner. None of this is captured by a freezer-and-fume-hood certification, which is precisely why the footprint has to be accounted across all three scopes rather than within the lab walls alone.

    A laboratory can earn a Gold certification for its bench practice and still have a large footprint dominated by flights and GPU-hours. Sustainable research means accounting for the whole footprint, then reducing the largest parts first — not optimising the parts that are easiest to see.

    Reduction first, offsetting last

    A consistent principle runs through credible sustainable-research practice: reduce before you offset. A carbon offset is widely treated as a last resort after genuine reduction, not a substitute for it, and a serious net-zero research commitment is one backed by measured reductions across the scopes rather than by purchased credits. The frameworks reflect this ordering: LEAF and My Green Lab are about cutting consumption, not buying absolution.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    Sustainability reporting in research is bedevilled by inconsistent terms — what counts in which scope, what a “green lab” certification actually attests, how a compute carbon estimate is calculated. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms and points back to LEAF and My Green Lab for the certifications and to the GHG Protocol for the scopes is what lets institutions compare footprints and funders set meaningful conditions. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play.

    What to do now

    For labs: pursue LEAF or My Green Lab certification, and start with cold storage, which is usually the biggest single energy line. For researchers and funders: account for travel and compute, the scope 3 parts a bench checklist misses, and decarbonise the largest of them first. For standards work: align sustainability vocabulary on the GHG scopes and the recognised certifications so footprints are comparable and net-zero claims are checkable.

    Related reading

  • Greening the lab: practical steps toward sustainable research

    A research laboratory is, by floor area, one of the most resource-hungry spaces a university operates. A typical lab can consume several times the energy of an equivalent office, runs equipment around the clock, gets through single-use plastics at a startling rate, and depends on fume hoods and freezers whose appetite for power is easy to overlook. None of this is incidental to research; it is the cost of doing it. But a great deal of that cost is avoidable without compromising scientific quality, and the case for reducing it is now both environmental and financial. This article sets out the practical steps that make a measurable difference, framed by the concepts in the sustainable research domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Where a lab’s footprint comes from

    Before changing anything, it helps to know where the impact actually sits. The largest contributors are usually energy — for HVAC, fume-hood ventilation, and cold storage — followed by consumables, particularly single-use plastics, and then the embodied impact of equipment, chemicals and reagents. Two pieces of equipment deserve special mention. Fume hoods can dominate a lab’s energy use because they continuously exhaust conditioned air; a single hood left open can use as much energy as several homes. Ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers, typically run at around minus eighty degrees Celsius, are individually among the most power-hungry items in any building, and a building full of them adds up quickly.

    Knowing this changes priorities. A campaign to reduce printing is well-meant but trivial next to managing fume-hood sashes and freezer temperatures, which is where the energy genuinely is.

    Two frameworks that structure the effort

    Two community frameworks have become the common reference points for lab sustainability, and both work by making good practice concrete and recognised rather than aspirational.

    • LEAF — the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework, developed at University College London — gives labs a structured set of actions across energy, waste, water, procurement and research quality, organised into bronze, silver and gold tiers. Crucially it pairs actions with calculators that estimate the carbon and financial savings, so a lab can see what its changes are worth.
    • My Green Lab offers a green-lab certification used internationally, assessing actual lab practices and behaviours, and also runs programmes such as the ACT environmental-impact labelling of laboratory products, which helps buyers compare the sustainability of what they purchase.

    The value of both is the same: they turn ‘be more sustainable’ into a checklist of specific, evidenced steps, with recognition for completing them. That structure is what carries an initiative past the enthusiasm of a few individuals into something a whole department sustains.

    Practical steps that actually move the needle

    The highest-yield actions are unglamorous. On energy: keep fume-hood sashes closed when not in use — the single most effective behavioural change in many labs; switch off equipment that does not need to run overnight; and consolidate cold storage. On ULT freezers specifically, three measures stand out: raising set-points where the science allows (the difference between minus eighty and minus seventy can cut energy substantially while remaining safe for many samples), regular defrosting and coil cleaning to maintain efficiency, and a sample-management discipline so that freezers are not running to preserve material no one will ever use.

    On consumables, reducing single-use plastics where sterile single-use is not genuinely required, and joining glassware-washing or pipette-tip recycling schemes, addresses a visible and persistent waste stream. On procurement, choosing equipment and reagents with lower environmental impact — using labelling such as ACT to compare — builds sustainability into the supply chain rather than treating it as an afterthought. And on shared resources, pooling equipment across groups reduces the embodied impact of buying duplicate instruments that each sit idle most of the time.

    Understanding greenhouse-gas scopes

    To report progress credibly, it helps to understand how emissions are categorised under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, because institutional reporting increasingly uses this language. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources an organisation owns or controls — for a lab, this includes things burned on site and certain process and refrigerant emissions. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from purchased energy, principally electricity — which is where most of a lab’s energy footprint lands. Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions in the value chain, including purchased goods and services, the manufacture of equipment and consumables, waste disposal and business travel — and for research, Scope 3 is frequently the largest and hardest-to-measure category.

    The practical lesson is that lab efficiency mostly reduces Scope 2 (energy) directly, while procurement choices and reduced consumption chip away at Scope 3. A lab that wants to report honestly should be clear about which scope a given action affects, rather than claiming everything as a single undifferentiated saving.

    Sustainability as part of research quality

    The most durable framing treats environmental responsibility not as a constraint on research but as part of doing it well — alongside reproducibility, good data management and proper resource stewardship. Many of the same disciplines overlap: a lab that manages its samples carefully wastes less freezer energy and produces more reproducible work; a group that shares equipment and documents its methods is both leaner and more rigorous. Recording these practices and the people who lead them, including through structured contribution captured in the CRediT taxonomy, helps make sustainability a recognised part of the research record rather than invisible goodwill. The consistent vocabulary for describing sustainable-research practices and metrics is maintained in the CASRAI Dictionary, so that a lab’s progress can be reported and compared meaningfully.