Twelve reasons for labs to go greener

Scientific organisations like mine champion the role of R&D in rising to sustainability challenges. We highlight how discoveries and applications, involving multiple disciplines and sectors, have been key in everything from the unprecedented roll-out of Covid -19 vaccines and diagnostics to the fact that wind and solar are now the cheapest energy option for new power generation for many countries .

But what about the environmental footprint of research? And what do researchers think about this? What changes are people making?

These are some of the questions we started to explore last year. We’ve published our findings in our Sustainable Labs report, which references many initiatives and resources that already exist to support researchers in reducing the climate, pollution and biodiversity impacts of wet lab, dry lab and computational research.