The carbon footprint of research is unusually large per worker. A typical wet lab consumes 3-10 times the energy of an equivalent office space; a single ultra-low-temperature freezer running 24/7 uses as much electricity as an average household; single-use plastics in life-science labs alone are estimated globally at 5.5 million tonnes per year. A research-intensive university’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions sit primarily in lab buildings; its Scope 3 sits primarily in travel and procurement. The sustainability conversation in 2026 has moved from awareness to operational programmes, with two frameworks dominating: LEAF (the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework developed at UCL) and My Green Lab certification. This post is a practical tour.
Why labs are different
Office sustainability programmes (LED lighting, paper recycling, energy-efficient computing) translate poorly to laboratories because the energy intensity is in equipment that cannot simply be switched off. A freezer holding biological samples cannot be turned off at night; a fume hood cannot be reduced to standby; a sequencer cannot run at half power. Lab sustainability is therefore primarily a question of which equipment runs and how it is operated, not whether it is on.
The corollary is that lab sustainability programmes need a different vocabulary and a different evidence base than office sustainability. Both LEAF and My Green Lab were designed in response to this; both have been validated empirically over the 2018-2024 period.
LEAF
The Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework, developed at University College London by Martin Farley and colleagues, is a self-assessment-and-certification framework structured at three levels (Bronze, Silver, Gold). LEAF’s strength is that it is operationally specific: each level lists discrete actions a lab can take, and the actions are tied to estimated energy and waste impacts based on UK lab benchmarks.
The LEAF Bronze level covers basics: freezer temperature optimisation, sash management on fume hoods, equipment shutdown protocols, recycling, lighting, water conservation. Silver adds: research-life-cycle assessment, supplier engagement, training, advocacy. Gold adds: integrated sustainability planning, leadership in the institution’s sustainability programme, mentorship of other labs.
By 2026 LEAF is in use at over 1,000 institutions globally, with strong concentration in the UK (where it was developed and has the strongest institutional backing). The LEAF self-assessment is free; the certification process involves institutional review. The framework is open and has been adapted to several national contexts.
The LEAF impact data
The 2023 UCL study of LEAF Bronze-certified labs found average energy reductions of 5-15% versus baseline, primarily from freezer optimisation and fume-hood sash management. The 2024 follow-up at LEAF Silver labs found additional 5-10% reductions and significant reductions in single-use plastic consumption through supplier engagement. The data underwrite the framework: this is not aspirational, it is documented.
My Green Lab
My Green Lab is a US-based non-profit operating a complementary certification programme that has dominated the North American market and increasingly the international one. My Green Lab Certification (MGLC) is built around a survey assessment in 14 categories (energy, water, waste, green chemistry, purchasing, training, etc.) with a numerical score and an annual recertification cycle.
My Green Lab also operates the ACT Label (Accountability, Consistency, Transparency) for lab products: a vendor-supplied environmental-impact rating for an individual product (pipette tip, plate, reagent) covering its energy, water, packaging, and chemical inputs. The ACT Label is in widespread use across major lab suppliers (Eppendorf, Thermo Fisher, Bio-Rad, NEB) and has become a discriminator at the procurement stage for sustainability-minded labs.
By 2026 My Green Lab claims over 4,000 certified labs across more than 70 countries; the certified-lab cohort is concentrated in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industrial research, with growing academic uptake.
Choosing between LEAF and My Green Lab
Most institutions can choose one and stick with it. LEAF is more prescriptive (the levels list specific actions); My Green Lab is more diagnostic (the survey identifies areas for improvement and tracks scores over time). LEAF has stronger UK and European institutional backing; My Green Lab has stronger US and pharmaceutical-industry backing. An institution coordinating with a major US pharmaceutical partner is likely better off with My Green Lab; one coordinating with UKRI or EU funders is likely better off with LEAF.
Some institutions run both. The duplicate-overhead cost is moderate (the underlying lab practices are largely the same; the documentation is different) and the dual recognition can be useful.
Freezer management: the biggest single lever
The single most impactful intervention in most labs is freezer management. A typical -80°C ultra-low-temperature freezer consumes 16-22 kWh/day. Switching to -70°C set point (acceptable for most stored samples per the 2018 Gail Phébré et al. validation) cuts consumption by 30-40%. Combining with a sample-inventory audit (most labs have 10-30% of freezer contents that are unused, unlabelled, or duplicated and can be discarded) frees space and avoids new freezer purchases.
The UCL Race to Zero trial in 2022-2023 had 53 labs switch -80°C freezers to -70°C; the energy savings were as predicted and no sample integrity issues were reported across 12+ months of follow-up. This is now standard guidance in both LEAF and My Green Lab.
Single-use plastics
The wet-lab single-use-plastic flow is enormous and largely necessary (sterility, contamination control, reproducibility). The mitigation in 2026 has two prongs. First, vendor switching: products with ACT Labels in the better tiers (post-consumer recycled content packaging, take-back programmes, reduced primary packaging) materially reduce flows. Second, recycling streams: rigid PE/PP lab plastics (tip boxes, conical tube racks) are recyclable in dedicated lab-plastic streams operated by several vendors. The recycling capture rate has grown substantially since 2022.
The remaining hard problem is contaminated plastics (anything that has touched biological or chemical materials and cannot be cleanly recycled). The mitigation is procurement-stage: smaller tip volumes, single-use serological pipette redesigns with less plastic per unit, reusable glassware where appropriate.
Sustainable HPC
High-performance computing is the fastest-growing emissions source in many research universities. A modern HPC cluster running 24/7 at high utilisation has a substantial Scope 2 footprint; AI-training workloads in particular have caused HPC electricity consumption to grow sharply since 2022.
The mitigations in 2026 include: power-aware job scheduling (running flexible jobs when grid carbon intensity is low, e.g., when wind generation is high); efficiency-first allocation (prioritising jobs that have demonstrated CPU/GPU efficiency); ML-model-efficiency policies (preferring smaller, more efficient models where they suffice); reporting emissions per project in the same way that we report compute hours.
The Green Algorithms tool and the CodeCarbon Python library let researchers estimate emissions per analysis. UKRI and the EU’s HORIZON programme now ask researchers to report estimated emissions in proposals for compute-heavy projects.
Conference travel: the Scope 3 elephant
Academic conference travel is, for most research-intensive universities, the single largest Scope 3 emissions category. A round-trip transatlantic flight emits roughly 1-2 tonnes of CO2 per passenger; an academic with a typical conference cadence can easily account for 5-10 tonnes/year of travel emissions, which dwarfs everything else they personally consume.
The 2020-2024 pandemic enforced a partial shift to virtual conferencing; the post-pandemic settlement has not held. By 2026 conference travel is largely back to pre-pandemic levels, though with somewhat more hybrid options. The frameworks that have emerged include: institutional travel-budget caps with carbon-equivalent accounting; conference-clustering (attending one trip with multiple events rather than several separate trips); flight-free regional conferences (the UK Reproducibility Network’s flight-free Easter conference, the European Geosciences Union’s hybrid format); and proportional-attendance models in which junior researchers attend in person while seniors attend virtually.
The conference travel emissions conversation is genuinely difficult because there are real career and equity costs to reducing in-person attendance. The current best practice is to count, declare, and make trade-offs visible, rather than to impose a top-down quota.
Scope 1, 2, 3 in research-org context
For a research institution: Scope 1 is direct (campus heating fuel, owned vehicles); Scope 2 is purchased energy (electricity, district heating); Scope 3 is everything else (travel, procurement, commuting, waste, investments). For a typical research-intensive university, Scope 3 is 70-90% of total emissions, with travel and procurement dominating. The implication is that a serious sustainability programme must address Scope 3 procurement (sustainable lab purchasing) and Scope 3 travel (conferences and fieldwork), not just on-campus operations.
The sustainable-research domain at CASRAI tracks framework adoption and institutional case studies; the research carbon footprint entry walks through the standard accounting methodology adapted for research organisations.
Related dictionary entries
- LEAF – Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework
- My Green Lab
- Research carbon footprint
- Sustainable HPC
- Conference travel emissions
- ACT Label
- Scope 3 emissions (research)
- Freezer management programme
References
Farley et al., LEAF: a tool for laboratory sustainability assessment (UCL technical report, 2019, updated 2023). My Green Lab, 2024 Certification Standard (current version). Urbina et al., Labs should cut plastic waste too (Nature, 2015, the foundational plastics paper). Lannelongue et al., Green Algorithms: Quantifying the carbon footprint of computation (Advanced Science, 2021). UCL Race to Zero, Freezer temperature transition report (2023).