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Welcome to
Greening the Bench
This series exists to give you practical, actionable changes, many of them free, that any lab can start making today. The benefits rarely stop at the environment: the same changes that lower your impact often cut costs too, and frequently make the lab run more efficiently, saving time as well as money.
You'll find everything organised across four areas: Culture, Energy, Waste and Water. Whether it's shifting habits across your team, powering down equipment, rethinking single-use plastics, or saving water that would otherwise run down the drain, every post is something you can put into practice straight away.
Choose Your Level: Reduce Water Waste with the right Purity
A guide through why selecting the right water level for your use is vital to reduce water waste in laboratories with actionable insights on how to make it happen in your lab.
The Hum Stops Here: Save Energy by Turning Off BSCs
In a previous Greening the Bench post, Switch Off to Save: Tackling Plug Load in the Lab, we explored how small changes to equipment habits can cut energy use. This time, we’re focusing on biosafety cabinets, a crucial piece of lab equipment often left running 24/7. Simply switching them off when not in use can save energy without compromising safety. Understanding Biosafety Cabinets Biosafety cabinets (BSCs) are vital for protecting both samples and operators. They provide a
Experimentation Miniaturisation: Doing More with Less
In a previous Greening the Bench post, Rethink Before You Recycle: Tackling Lab Consumables Waste, we looked at how rethinking what we use can have a big impact on lab waste. This time, we’re taking that same mindset to the experimental scale itself, exploring how much can be saved, both financially and environmentally, by simply doing more with less. Whether you’re preparing buffers, culturing cells, or running chromatographic analyses, there’s often room to scale down. Mini
Switch Off Together: Building a Shutdown Culture in the Lab
We’ve talked before about plug loads and the energy wasted by equipment left on unnecessarily, a hidden but significant cost to both budgets and sustainability goals. (See our Switch Off to Save blog for more detail on that.) But there’s one thing that’s harder than installing a plug timer or putting up a sticker: building a culture where everyone takes responsibility for switching off. Shutting down lab instruments and kit at the end of the day isn’t something one person can
Night-Time Savings: How Safe HVAC Setbacks Pay Off
Walk into your lab on Monday and everything feels just right: clean benches, stable temperatures, and full ventilation. Now imagine the building working just as smartly while you were away, keeping things safe, but not working harder than it needs to. That’s the idea behind HVAC setbacks: thoughtful, safety-led adjustments overnight that cut energy use and costs without disrupting your work. Labs use more energy than offices Per square metre, labs typically consume 3–5× more
Sustainability Isn’t a Solo Sport: Why Green Team’s Make Every Lab Stronger
If you’ve ever tried to make your lab more sustainable and felt like no one else cared, you’re not the only one. You notice the plastic waste piling up. You wonder why machines are left running. You spot chances to do better, but it feels like you’re the only one seeing them. A lot of people care. But when you go it alone, it can feel isolating. That’s why green teams matter. Working together makes things easier and more effective. Small Teams, Big Results Some of the biggest
Rethink Before You Recycle: Tackling Lab Consumables Waste
If the amount of plastic that your lab goes through feels overwhelming, you’re definitely not alone. From pipette tips and falcon tubes, to gloves and wipes, single-use plastic consumables are the norm in most lab environments. They do provide convenience and help to prevent contamination but they end up being a frequent hidden expense, and filling up our bins. Recycling is the easy option, simple, visible and familiar and it can feel great! Throwing plastic items away hoping
Switch Off to Save: Tackling Plug Load in the Lab
When we think about energy use in laboratories, we often picture the big players such as ultra-low freezers, fume hoods, HVAC systems as we’ve touched on in previous blogs. But hiding in plain sight is a more subtle, yet significant contributor to lab energy waste: plug load. That’s the term for all the energy drawn by equipment simply plugged into a socket and in many labs, it’s quietly consuming power even when no one’s around. Plug load: The hidden cost of idle equipment P
Do You Really Need That? Reducing Waste Through Equipment Sharing
Labs are packed with equipment, workhorses like centrifuges, spectrometers, and stirrers. But step back and ask: how many of them are actually in use right now? The truth is uncomfortable. Many labs have equipment that sits idle, while the lab next door buys another version of the same thing. This isn’t just inefficient but wasteful, expensive, and environmentally unsustainable. If we’re serious about sustainability in science, we need to stop normalising this culture of isol
Stop the Flow: Saving Water with Recirculating Chillers
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. This is true in laboratories as much as the sea, with water usage being a significant but often overlooked sustainability issue. In many labs, single-pass cooling - where water runs once through an apparatus before being discarded - remains a common practice, wasting thousands of litres of clean water every day. Why Is Single-Pass Cooling a Problem? Single-pass cooling, uses a continuous stream of tap water to absorb heat from
Warming Up ULT Freezers: A Simple Step for Big Energy Savings
One of the most common questions I hear when discussing lab sustainability is, “Which piece of equipment in my lab consumes the most energy?” While the answer can vary depending on your specific setup, if you have an Ultra Low Temperature (ULT) freezer, it’s almost certainly at the top of the list. In fact, a single ULT freezer can use as much energy as an entire home - and many labs house rows of these freezers, each packed with valuable biological samples. Why We Need ULT F
The Power of a Closed Sash: Maximising efficiency and safety in VAV Fume Hoods
In the world of laboratory work, safety and efficiency are non-negotiable. One of the most critical elements in this equation is the fume hood—a vital safety device designed to protect you from hazardous fumes, vapours, and particulates. But did you know that airflow is often the most energy-intensive process in laboratories across the UK? To put this into perspective, a typical office requires 4 to 10 air changes per hour (ACH). In contrast, laboratory settings demand 6 to 3
Greening the Bench: Your First Steps for Actionable Change
Welcome to Greening the Bench, your go-to resource for transforming the way we conduct scientific research with sustainability at the forefront. Science labs are notoriously resource intensive environments, consuming five to ten times more energy and three to five times more water than traditional office settings. If scientific research were a country, it would rank 40th in CO2 emissions. Additionally, research laboratories generate approximately 5.5 million tons of plastic w
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