Greening science: what’s in it for you?

Nervous and excited. That’s how I felt in early 2023 as I waved goodbye to my successful ten-year biomedical career and permanent contract, to dedicate myself fully to the cause of green science. A few years before this transition, I recognized a huge mismatch between my behaviour at home and my practices at work. At home, I checked all my food wrappings meticulously for recyclability options, yet, in the laboratory, I dumped kilograms of single-use plastics in the bin, ready to be incinerated. I was flying all around the world for conferences and had many terabytes of 3D-imaging data stored in the cloud.
I started to wonder: how can I change my behaviour and minimize the environmental footprint of my research activities?

Nature Spotlight: Green laboratories

I soon found a like-minded green buddy, Hannah Johnson, at the DREAM3DLAB in the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where I did my final postdoc. Clearly, I was not alone. We engaged with others in the biomedical field, leading to the establishment of the Green Labs NL foundation in early 2021. Our mission? To accelerate the transition to a just and sustainable lab environment and scientific landscape in the Netherlands and beyond.
We set up our foundation during the early stage of what feels like a wave of grass-roots initiatives in science and health care. Over the past 3 years in the Netherlands alone, more than 100 green initiatives for health transition have emerged, united under the umbrella of the Dutch Green Health Alliance. The wave comes at a time when eco-anxiety, the fear of an environmental cataclysm, is at a high — several surveys have highlighted the distress that negative environmental news is causing1.
Inspired by many other individuals who share values such as climate justice, care and collective action, I turned my fear about our planet into concrete actions and began to experience feelings of empowerment and hope.
Almost all lab scientists I meet during workshops express a clear will to change. However, given the high pressure that researchers face to publish results quickly and with the highest possible scientific impact, prioritizing green actions can be hard. This is why I greatly value green lab-certification programmes and challenges; they form powerful tools to motivate action.
Inspired by the growing number of ‘freezer challenges’ organized all around the world, I helped to organize one with my local green team at the Princess Máxima Center. We invited groups to compete in challenges that improved cold-storage management — such as discarding old samples, making sample inventories or designing sample-exit strategies for departing lab members — and crowned the winners ‘ice champions’. Efforts led to increased awareness, improved lab infrastructure and considerable cost and energy savings from shutting down freezers or turning up their temperature.
In addition to improving cold storage, there are many other opportunities for sustainability in the lab. But how can teams prioritize actions? Shortly after founding Green Labs NL, we heard about the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF), set up by University College London. Like other certification programmes, such as My Green Lab and GreenDisc, LEAF is an online tool with which labs can earn bronze, silver or gold awards by meeting sustainability criteria. Because of LEAF’s concrete guidance, and with the support of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports, we were able to coordinate the programme’s roll-out in the Netherlands in 2021 with great success. More than 100 labs at 15 Dutch institutes have enrolled in LEAF since then. The initiative was followed by a wave of ‘green lab coordinators’ being hired throughout the country.
A 2022 paper2 surveyed 63 grass-roots groups in academic settings and found that the main challenges of sustainable research included a lack of time, budget, involvement in decisions and support from institutes’ management. Indeed, I have found that the bold, ethical leadership crucial for driving equitable green transitions is still scarce among academic managers and executives.
How can we obtain broad support from the top? I quickly learnt that it is key to highlight the combined benefits, showing how green initiatives can also lead to cost savings, improved lab infrastructure, employee engagement and job satisfaction. Employees, particularly young people3, value organizations that are environmentally responsible and increasingly ask their leaders to take climate action.
I think that academic leaders in particular — with their decision-making power and role-model function — have a moral obligation to act. A 2023 study4 shows that when leaders in an organization demonstrate responsible and environmentally conscious behaviour, employees are encouraged to do so, too.
In September 2023, I helped to organize the Green Labs NL event ‘Sparking green movement in the funding landscape’ in Utrecht, which brought together 11 funders from the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom to discuss how such agencies could provide the basis for sustainable research practices.
Although most funders are still exploring how to implement concrete actions, some are already taking important steps. First, in terms of what studies to fund, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences published an advisory report on future priorities in planetary health research, and UK Research and Innovation launched a funding call tailored to improving sustainability in research.
Second, in terms of how research is performed, funders — including Wellcome in the United Kingdom and the German research foundation DFG — are experimenting with ways to incorporate sustainability into grant-application forms. The value of green lab-certification tools also becomes clear: Wellcome will require that grant recipients have achieved a minimum level of accreditation by the end of 2025, and Cancer Research UK includes a silver certification level as an eligibility criterion in one of its grants.
Finally, funding bodies, including Europe’s life-sciences organization EMBO in Heidelberg, Germany, are taking the lead in organizing international multi-stakeholder gatherings to foster collaboration and joint development of international sustainability standards. As funders make progress in this area, the academic community is urged to follow suit.
All these developments are encouraging and give me hope, because they will move all actors in the system. Even though the road might be bumpy, this shift will make it crucial for individuals at all levels of academia to take action and align with the emerging sustainability standards. Collective action will ultimately benefit science, society and the planet.