Labs Burn Through Energy and Plastic at a Scale Most People Never See
Scientific laboratories consume dramatically more energy and generate far more waste per square meter than typical office buildings, and a wave of new sustainability data is finally putting numbers behind what insiders have long suspected: the world’s research infrastructure carries an outsized environmental footprint.
As detailed by BestLabTech, the average researcher discards roughly 116 kilograms of plastic waste every year, with the figure swinging anywhere from 32 to 237 kilograms depending on the specific technique used. Scale that across the estimated 20,500 research institutions operating worldwide, and the plastic problem alone becomes difficult to ignore, even before factoring in energy consumption.
Where the plastic actually comes from
Much of that waste isn’t exotic lab equipment — it’s everyday consumables. Serological pipettes top the list at just over 16% of total plastic waste by weight, followed closely by pipette tip boxes and multiwell plates. Gloves, packaging, and Falcon tubes round out the top contributors. Altogether, the ten most common items account for nearly 87% of everything labs throw away. By polymer type, polystyrene and polypropylene alone make up almost three-quarters of the total.
There’s a practical fix already in motion: reusing consumables. A single reuse cycle cuts plastic use in half, and five cycles bring an 80% reduction. The climate benefit is smaller since reconditioning has its own footprint, but researchers still report meaningful savings — up to 4.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per tonne of plastic across five reconditioning cycles, with no measurable drop in experimental performance.
Energy is the bigger story
Plastic waste is visible; energy use often isn’t. Labs typically consume five to ten times more energy than an office of equivalent size, and that multiplier can climb to 100 times in facilities that rely on clean rooms. The reason is ventilation: labs require six to ten full air changes per hour, compared to roughly one for a standard office. At Harvard, laboratories occupy about a fifth of the university’s total floor space but account for nearly 44% of its energy consumption.
Cold storage compounds the issue. A standard ultra-low-temperature freezer running at -80°C uses around 20 kilowatt-hours a day — comparable to a small house. Simply raising the set point to -70°C cuts that consumption by close to 30%, a change that costs nothing and requires no new equipment. Fume hoods tell a similar story: an untreated hood can cost over $3,000 a year to run, but sash-management programs and automation bring that down substantially. Harvard’s “Shut the Sash” initiative alone saved roughly 70% of associated HVAC energy, worth $200,000–$250,000 annually.
Certification is spreading, unevenly
Institutional programs are picking up on these findings. More than 4,500 laboratories across 54 countries now hold My Green Lab certification, with pharmaceutical companies moving fastest — Biogen has certified 100% of its labs, and Sanofi is on track for 95%. Academic institutions lag noticeably behind, a gap researchers attribute more to program design than to cost. The average certified lab reports saving about 29,000 kilowatt-hours a year, though some academic programs, such as one at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have saved well over $1.4 million cumulatively since 2017.
Water use follows a similar pattern to energy: laboratories consume roughly five times more water per square meter than office space, and in some universities lab water accounts for up to 60% of total institutional consumption. Autoclaves and single-pass cooling systems are the biggest culprits, with the latter capable of consuming nearly a million liters per reaction annually.
Zooming out, the pharmaceutical sector’s overall carbon footprint grew 77% between 1995 and 2019 — far outpacing the 49% growth in global emissions over the same period. Roughly three-quarters of that footprint sits in Scope 3 emissions, meaning supply chains and purchased goods rather than direct lab operations.
The academic-versus-pharma divide becomes even clearer when comparing specific institutions. UW-Madison, for instance, enrolled just 21 labs over three years despite a stated target of 50 annually, with only 8 completing certification in the most recent cycle. Contrast that with AstraZeneca, which has certified 129 lab spaces across 19 countries, 91 of them at the highest tier, making it the first organization globally to achieve My Green Lab 2.0 status. The difference isn’t really about money — it’s about how the program is structured and who owns it internally. A parallel option exists for budget-constrained academic departments: LEAF, the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework, run by University College London. Unlike My Green Lab, LEAF is free and self-assessed rather than externally verified, and it currently counts 85 participating institutions worldwide. The University of Groningen alone reported 46 accredited labs under this framework by late 2023. Whether an institution chooses a fee-based, verified path or a free, self-assessed one, the underlying data suggests that consistent measurement — not the specific framework — is what ultimately drives savings.
The takeaway
None of this points to a lack of solutions. Freezer set points, sash management, and consumable reuse are all low-cost, low-friction changes that labs can implement immediately. What the data suggests instead is a gap between knowing what works and actually doing it consistently — particularly outside the pharmaceutical industry, where adoption still trails far behind.
