New UCL tool help scientists reduce their carbon footprint

A UCL framework to support sustainable lab practices is changing how scientists across the world design their experiments to minimise waste and reduce the environmental impacts of innovations.

Scientific innovations are critical to addressing the world’s big challenges, including climate heating. But laboratories themselves are energy ‘hungry’, consume resources and create pollutants. To be sustainable, they must also change the way they work.

A team at Sustainable UCL has worked closely with the worldwide scientific community to develop a set of tools and resources that are helping to reduce carbon emissions and plastic waste in labs. The resulting online Laboratory Efficient Assessment Framework (LEAF) encourages scientists to consider the environmental impacts of the innovations they develop.

“Science labs can use 10 times the energy of other academic spaces, such as offices. This is in part due to energy intensive equipment such as freezers, but impacts extend beyond energy, for example single-use plastic consumables and harmful chemicals,” explains Martin Farley (Sustainable UCL), who leads the initiative.

““LEAF is helping to accelerate the move to sustainable science in the UK and internationally by ensuring the research community is at the forefront of sustainable laboratory practice.”

LEAF includes a set of criteria and educational tools that help lab users to reduce their use of plastics, water, energy and other resources. These actions include reviewing their use of single-use plastics, such as gloves, containers, and pipette tips. The tool also promotes actions around ‘green’ chemistry, such as assessing solvent usage. Implementing the framework has been shown to reduce waste and improve efficiencies without negatively impacting the quality or progress of the science.

As well as measuring carbon emissions, LEAF’s inbuilt ‘calculators’ enable laboratories to estimate the impact of their actions in financial terms. An initial two-year pilot scheme involving UCL and 22 other universities and research institutes, saved a total of £641,000 and avoided 648 tonnes of CO2 emissions – equivalent to taking 140 cars off the road for a year.

Since its launch in 2018, more than 1,100 labs from 70 institutions in 12 countries have pledged to use LEAF, making it the world’s most widely used standard for sustainable laboratory operations. The framework has also been implemented by UKRI’s Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), two of the UK’s major research funders.

“LEAF is helping to accelerate the move to sustainable science in the UK and internationally by ensuring the research community is at the forefront of sustainable laboratory practice,” Martin added.

"It's great to see how the science sector has embraced LEAF. We're excited to begin working with even more of the scientific community to meet the challenges posed by climate change." 

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