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.