ISH wins silver UCL Sustainable Labs Award

The UCL Sustainability Awards ceremony took place on 18 July in the Jeremy Bentham Room in UCL's main building. They are organised by Green UCL, which brings together UCL's Sustainability Team and its network of Green Champions. The awards themselves were appropriately sustainable this year: they came in the form of plants! The award was presented to Dr Scott Orr (pictured), one of our newest members of staff, who was representing UCL ISH at the event. 

We are particularly pleased that this award shows the progress we have made since 2018, when we received our bronze award. The silver award highlights sustainable practices in our lab such as using communal booking systems and good maintenance of our equipment. This year, we have also set up a new recycling system in the lab. 

The new Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) template set up by UCL Sustainability allowed us to quantify our carbon savings, which came out as 12.5 tons (which represents a 29% decrease). This is approximately half the carbon footprint of an American family.

The next step is the Gold Award, which we are now working towards for next year. We are also aiming for an award for our labs at HereEast.

A special thanks must go to Dr Miriam Wright, our laboratory technician, for all her hard work she put into our application.

• Find out more about our Heritage Science Laboratory
• Find out more about UCL at Here East
• Find out more about the awards organiser, Green UCL