King's College London

The CDN was awarded a Platinum ‘My Green Lab’ award after staff introduced a series of simple and effective sustainability measures across 18 labs. By switching off equipment overnight alone, the My Green Lab calculators estimate their energy savings to be 23.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year and £27k a year.

As research labs are highly collaborative spaces where different teams have different ways of working, a dedicated Green Neuro Team (GNT) worked closely with staff, students, and key technical staff from across the department to help shape and deliver energy saving practices.

 

Five key sustainability areas for labs to focus on

The team focused their efforts on five areas: water use, autoclaving, switching equipment off, freezer management, and laboratory waste.

“Researchers are incredibly busy people, and their time is valuable – so it was really important to us that we made engagement with our initiatives as straightforward as possible,” says Emily Winson-Bushby, a final year PhD student, and GNT co-lead. “This was the approach we took – condensing our sustainability efforts into a small number of simple actionable steps”.

 

Water

Many experimental neuroscience lab protocols require purified water. Purifying water is a highly energy intensive process. The team encouraged researchers to use the lowest appropriate grade of purified water, avoiding unnecessary energy-intensive purification.

 

Autoclaving

Autoclaving is a process of sterilising lab equipment, which can be essential when working with biological systems. It requires heating a chamber to very high temperature and pressure which inevitably comes at an energy cost. The team encouraged researchers to avoid sterilising items unnecessarily and to run fuller autoclave loads where possible.

 

Switching off equipment

Next the GNT turned their focus to preventing energy-consuming equipment being left on overnight unnecessarily.

Stickers on equipment reminded researchers when instruments could safely be switched off, reducing unnecessary overnight energy use. For specialist pieces of equipment, lab representatives were tasked with coordinating with equipment users to make sure it was clear if a piece of equipment had to be left on overnight or should be switched off after each use. Where appropriate, timers were offered to switch equipment off automatically.

Freezers

Research labs rely on freezers to preserve biological samples, but over time they can become filled with forgotten material. After clearing out unused samples, the team retired one ultra-low temperature freezer and two -20°C freezers. They also raised six ultra-low temperature freezers from -80°C to -70°C where appropriate, producing further energy savings.

 

Lab Waste

The GNT previously introduced a recycling scheme at the CDN, reducing the amount of non-contaminated waste sent for high-temperature incineration. In 2025, they expanded these efforts with a take-back scheme for pipette racks and boxes, diverting further lab waste from undergoing high-temp incineration.

“The take-back scheme allowed us to avoid a further 312 kg of lab waste undergoing high-temp incineration,” commented Dr Martyna Panasiuk, a Research Associate, and GNT co-lead.

“We also worked with several suppliers, including StarLab and Sigma, to support the recycling of pipette tip racks and 2.5-litre bottles. None of this would have been possible without the support and collaboration of the Sustainability Team,” added Carlos Roncancio-Garcia, Resource Manager for the CDN, and GNT co-lead.

 

The Future

The CDN is not the only research area at King’s driving greener lab practices. Across the School of Neuroscience, many departments are taking steps to make their research more sustainable, with the Wolfson SPaRC and Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute being awarded Silver LEAF awards in 2026. More widely at King’s, 44 departments and 74 accredited teams, reached silver or gold in the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) – a significant increase from the 2025 awards in which 64 teams achieved bronze level or higher.

Funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust are also starting to require certifications such as those from My Green Lab, placing sustainability at the heart of research.

Carlos Roncancio-Garcia, Resource Manager for the CDN, and GNT co-lead, said: “Many of the most effective sustainability measures in laboratories are actually quite simple. Often, it’s about raising awareness, improving coordination and making better use of the resources we already have.”

Emily Winson-Bushby, a final year PhD student, and GNT co-lead, said: “In my opinion, Carlos and the technical team are the real heroes of the effort. Alongside with the lab representatives and every member of the CDN who took the time and effort to do their bit, this was really a team effort,”

 

 

Many thanks to all the Green Neuro Team members:

Carlos Ronancio-Garcia, Emily Winson-Bushby, Martyna Panasiuk, Filipe Machado Ferreira, Marian Fernandez-Otero, Nancy Carvajal Garcia, Lourdes Osuna Almagro, Mfon Inua, Sashagale Henry, Sabela Rey Arce, Matthew Bostock.