Sustainable lab buildings
After a decade of grassroots growth, the laboratory sustainability movement is bursting into the mainstream finds James Mitchell Crow
New buildings represent one apex of the rapidly spreading laboratory sustainability movement. It offers a glimpse of what could become the new standard for research space design. Whether or not Nottingham’s Carbon Neutral Laboratories become a model for how all labs in future will operate, change in one form or another is coming to research workspaces. Sustainable practices, pioneered in forward-thinking research organisations over the past decade or so, are on the verge of become an integral part of everyday life in the lab.
Can a building fundamentally reshape the working practices of its occupants, so that sustainability becomes integral? Nottingham’s new building has been set up to get its occupants to stop and think – about safety, sustainability and the experiment itself – before each experiment they conduct.