European Molecular Biology Laboratory Creates Culture of Sustainability

I2SL’s Sustainable Laboratory Awards’ Programs and Initiatives category recognizes outstanding organizations or teams for their green lab practices, systematic changes that promote a culture of sustainability across lab operations, or supplier initiatives to reduce waste and toxicity. This October, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) received the 2024 Outstanding Lab Programs and Initiatives Award for taking a comprehensive approach to achieve lab sustainability, with numerous research groups and scientific service teams at six different locations across Europe.

As a provider of cutting-edge fundamental life science research, tools, and expertise to scientists in Europe and beyond, EMBL is committed to environmentally responsible and relevant research and to promoting sustainable science. To connect national and international green lab groups across the continent, EMBL helped create the Sustainable European Laboratories Network, which promotes sustainable science and knowledge sharing to help transform European research laboratories into more sustainable facilities.

Over the past several years, EMBL has established recycling initiatives to reduce packaging waste in its labs; for example, EMBL introduced recycling bins for mixed cardboard and paper, as well as plastic and metal packaging materials in 2023, recycling over 66 tons of waste that year. EMBL also established pipette tip box recycling at its headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, which has helped divert 529 cubic feet of pipette tip boxes. Other EMBL sites have chosen to implement a supplier return scheme to collect and return empty pipette tip boxes to the supplier. These initiatives have contributed to a 30 percent reduction in the amount of waste being sent to landfill and waste-to-energy facilities from EMBL’s headquarters since 2022, bringing their recycling rate to 39 percent in 2023! To remind lab users of how much plastic waste research activities can create, the EMBL Heidelberg Green Action group created an art exhibition using the tip boxes that were collected for recycling.

EMBL also recognized that behavior change among researchers is essential to the success of the sustainability initiatives undertaken at labs across the organization. To inspire its researchers to adopt effective sustainability behaviors, EMBL set and reached a 2023 goal of having all of its 82 labs sign up to the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF). Thanks to the efforts of researchers, 61 of those labs received LEAF certification, and five achieved LEAF Gold! EMBL uses LEAF to encourage expanded recycling efforts, energy audits through the Scientific Instrumentation Management Team, and freezers to be turned up to -70°C.

Because data services constitute EMBL’s largest electricity use, their data center teams have taken the initiative to implement strategies such as automatic node shutdown, limited processor frequencies, improved cooling, transferring to more efficient data centers, and consolidating data. Thanks to these efforts, EMBL reduced energy use across all its sites by 4.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity in 2023—19 percent lower than in 2021. Energy use reductions also decreased the organization’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions from nearly 14,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in 2019 to 11,330 tCO2e by 2023, a reduction of 18 percent.

Read about the achievements of the other Sustainable Laboratory Award Programs and Initiatives category winners on I2SL’s website, and join a free webinar on November 13 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern to hear from three green labs winners from the U.K. and Europe.