Designing for sustainable science: a roadmap to greener labs

Life science buildings are among the most energy-intensive and waste-generating spaces in the built environment, yet demand for them is rising fast. In this blog, James-Buckley-Walker, Partner, 3PM, Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard, Partner and Head of Innovation, GXN and Liam Brandwood, Circular Design Specialist, GXN, share their vision of a smarter, more human-focused approach to lab design and operation.

The Government has recently committed £86 billion to boost Britain’s world-leading status in research and innovation while strengthening the UK economy. Decarbonisation is vital to this, and front and centre in the UKRI’s vision for building a future economy—and for good reason. Few sectors are more energy-intensive and wasteful than life science buildings. After all, laboratories currently contribute to 2% of the world’s plastic waste and use up to 10 times more energy per square metre than other academic spaces. With increasing investment in and demand for life science buildings, the need for a roadmap to a low-carbon future is more urgent than ever.

At 3PM and GXN, we believe this roadmap should focus on two things: making labs easier to run sustainably and designing science buildings with just the right amount of flexibility.

So, what does a Green Lab really look like? With labs running 24/7, using complex equipment, and generating difficult waste streams, they can only be green if used in the right way. That’s why lab managers and users are crucial to reducing operational emissions. We think this area, sustainable behaviours, has a lot of untapped potential, as there is a limit to how far we can bring down carbon from purely technical means.

Ensuring long-lasting buildings that continue to perform for both owners and users is another key piece to this. Scientific research evolves quickly, and buildings often struggle to keep up. Over-specifying leads to waste; too much flexibility can result in unnecessary carbon and cost, especially if options remain underutilised. The real challenge is finding the right balance, making sure spaces can support science occupiers as they grow.

To get this right, we’ve immersed ourselves in the day-to-day life of labs, and gathered data on the behaviours of scientists and lab teams. These insights allow us to design better briefs, inform sustainable practices, and help occupiers work toward their own net-zero goals.

So how can we use these learnings? We’re helping to connect the dots between landlords, asset owners, and occupiers. We like to think of these projects as a big puzzle, and we have identified a few missing pieces. We help fill those gaps by defining the science ecosystem, setting clear product strategies, developing behavioural and engagement guides, and crafting operational plans that reflect real-world use.

In short, we help define what science is going to happen in a space, and what that means for how it should be designed, fitted out, and run, for the occupier building owners are trying to attract. The more that building owners understand about what goes on inside their labs, the better they can plan for today’s needs and tomorrow’s possibilities. In practice, this means coming up with a concise roadmap for occupiers and landlords, one that is able to create spaces that truly support sustainable science for the long term.

In 2024, 3pm and GXN launched a paper, Transforming to Zero: Changing Behaviours for Decarbonising Laboratories, It offers 20 case studies and 3 practical roadmaps for navigating the complex path from thinking to doing. Each roadmap consists of goals, activities, and outputs that tackle specific challenges and opportunities around the paper’s three focus areas: (1) enabling organisational change in science, (2) improving operations of labs to support sustainable behaviours and (3) considerations for the design and construction of lab buildings. One year after the launch, we continue our commitment to help life science institutions in their ambitious decarbonisation targets, helping them break down the pathway to a truly green lab, tackling all the unknowns, one by one.