As host of the Concentrating on Chromatography podcast, I get to sit down with two very different kinds of guests: bench scientists presenting new analytical chemistry at conferences like ASMS, and the manufacturers and industry leaders — people like me — who build the instruments those scientists rely on. Every so often, though, a guest comes along who speaks directly to both audiences at once. Over the past several months, I had that experience twice, in conversations with Dr. Pernilla Sörme, Technical Program Director at My Green Lab, and James Connelly, the organization's CEO.
Watch the conversations with Dr. Pernilla Sörme and James Connelly:
I came away from both interviews with a much clearer picture of where lab sustainability is headed, why it's no longer a side project for the "eco-minded" lab, and — frankly — why it matters to a nitrogen evaporator and nitrogen generator manufacturer in Berlin, Massachusetts, as much as it does to a pharma giant's QA/QC department. I wanted to pull the most useful threads from those conversations together here, with some outside reporting layered in, because I think this is one of the more practically important topics in lab operations right now.
The Problem Is Bigger Than Most Labs Realize
It's easy to underestimate how resource-intensive a laboratory really is until you put a number next to it. Research labs typically consume five to ten times more energy per square foot than a comparable office building, and some specialty labs run as high as 100 times more. A large share of that draw comes from equipment that almost never gets switched off — freezers, fume hoods, centrifuges, and vacuum systems — running nights, weekends, and holidays out of habit rather than necessity.
Plastic waste tells a similar story. Single-use plastics from life-science labs alone are estimated at roughly 5.5 million tonnes globally every year. That single-use, sterility-driven model is partly unavoidable given contamination control requirements, but as Sörme pointed out when we talked, most labs have far more room to cut that number than they assume.
This is the backdrop My Green Lab was built against. What started a decade ago as one frustrated scientist's grassroots effort has grown into the certification standard for the industry: more than 4,500 labs across over 50 countries now hold My Green Lab Certification, spanning academic institutions, government labs, and roughly 41 of the top pharmaceutical companies. In 2025 the organization also opened certification to clinical and diagnostic labs for the first time.
What struck me most, though, was how fast sustainability has moved from "nice to have" to "business requirement." My Green Lab Certification was named a UN Race to Zero Breakthrough Outcome in 2021, which set a target for 95% of biotech and pharma labs to reach the highest certification level by 2030 — only a few years from now. On the funding side, Wellcome now requires labs it funds to hold My Green Lab, LEAF, or equivalent accreditation, and Cancer Research UK has gone a step further: starting in January 2026, CRUK grant applicants must hold My Green Lab or LEAF Certification at the silver level to even be eligible. That's not a marketing checkbox. That's a funding gate.
Behavior Change Is the Cheapest Lever in the Building
If there's one idea I want every lab manager reading this to walk away with, it's this: most of the easiest sustainability wins cost almost nothing.
Sörme's favorite example, and one I've seen in person more times than I can count, involves fume hood sashes. A fume hood can use as much energy as 3.5 households in a year, and a huge share of that draw comes down to something as simple as how far open the sash is left. One organization Sörme worked with measured the cost of leaving a sash open just an inch and a half — exactly the kind of "I'll close it later" gap that happens when someone's hands are full. That habit alone cost about $110 per hood, per year. Multiply that across an organization with 700 fume hoods, and a small daily habit becomes a real budget line.
The fix wasn't new equipment. It was a sticker campaign, some friendly inter-lab competition, and a bit of peer pressure — the kind of "shut the sash" reminder signage I see in nearly every academic and industrial lab I visit, usually taped right next to one of our evaporators. Our products are almost always operated inside a fume hood, so this is a habit I think about constantly when I'm in the field.
Sörme's broader point is that behavior change works because it's durable, cheap, and doesn't require capital approval. Connelly echoed this from the commercial side: the biggest misconception he still encounters is that sustainability slows research down or adds cost. In practice, his organization sees most commercial labs realize at least a 5x return on investment from certification, with academic labs sometimes seeing 10x to 30x, once energy, water, and consumable savings are tallied against the cost of the program itself.
Vendors Are Part of the Equation Now — Not Bystanders
The piece of this conversation that affects my work most directly is the role manufacturers play. According to a sustainability survey of over 500 senior lab personnel conducted with Agilent, more than 80% of analytical labs worldwide report they're implementing some form of sustainability program, and the large majority expect their equipment vendors to actively support those goals. Connelly put it bluntly: if a lab can't buy genuinely greener products, it can't actually be a green lab — no matter how diligent its staff is about turning things off at night.
That's the thinking behind the ACT Ecolabel, which My Green Lab launched in 2018 with Agilent as the founding partner. ACT stands for Accountability, Consistency, and Transparency, and it functions like a nutrition label for lab equipment: a third-party-verified score covering manufacturing impact, energy and water use, packaging, and end-of-life handling for a given instrument. It's now recommended by the U.S. EPA and aligned with EU green-claims regulations, with more than 70 manufacturers and well over a thousand products represented in the database. As both an instrument manufacturer and a marketer, I'll admit the idea of getting one of our own products through that audit is genuinely appealing — not because I expect a perfect score, but because, as Connelly told me, every single product that goes through ACT comes out with a documented list of opportunities for improvement. That's a useful gift for a manufacturer, not a punishment.
This is also where Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions become relevant to procurement conversations, not just corporate ESG reports. Scope 1 is what a company burns directly — fuel in trucks or furnaces. Scope 2 is the carbon embedded in the electricity it purchases. Scope 3 is everything upstream and downstream of that: the materials that go into a product, and the energy or waste impact of that product once it's out in the world, in someone else's lab. Connelly's framing has stuck with me since the interview: your Scope 1 and 2 emissions are somebody else's Scope 3. A more efficient instrument sitting in your fume hood is, in a very direct way, a smaller line item on your sustainability report — and a smaller one on ours.
There's regulatory weight behind this too. The EU's broader anti-greenwashing framework — most notably the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive — begins applying across EU member states in September 2026, banning vague, unsubstantiated "green" or "eco-friendly" claims on products and marketing materials unless they're backed by recognized, verifiable standards. Third-party programs like ACT are specifically built to hold up against that kind of scrutiny, which is increasingly the point.
What This Actually Means for Your Next Equipment Decision
So how does any of this change a purchasing decision in a real lab? A few things Sörme and Connelly both raised have changed how I think about our own equipment.
Old instrument versus new one isn't a simple answer. Sörme's advice was to actually measure the energy draw of what you're currently running, then compare it against newer options using a resource like the ACT database, rather than assuming newer automatically means greener. Equipment built to last decades — which has always been a point of pride for us, since plenty of our nitrogen evaporators from the 1980s and '90s are still in daily use in labs around the country — has real sustainability value simply by avoiding the embodied carbon cost of manufacturing a replacement.
Inputs matter as much as performance. Connelly's observation about the building industry applies directly to lab equipment manufacturing: companies obsess over the performance of the finished instrument and pay far less attention to where the raw materials came from. Locally sourced metal — something we've leaned into here in Massachusetts and throughout the northeast, rather than a supplier on the other side of the world — reduces both transportation emissions and the kind of supply-chain risk that became painfully obvious to a lot of manufacturers during COVID.
The technique itself carries a sustainability profile. This is more my own observation than something either guest said directly, but it follows naturally from the conversation: nitrogen blowdown evaporation is inherently a lower-energy approach to sample concentration than methods that depend on continuously running vacuum pumps and recirculating chillers, simply because it doesn't require that hardware in the first place. When a lab is evaluating its sample prep energy footprint, the concentration technique itself, not just the brand of equipment running it, is part of that calculation.
Glass beats plastic, and that one's settled science. Sörme noted that, unlike a lot of sustainability questions that still lack solid data, the glass-versus-plastic question has actually been studied, and glassware comes out ahead. For labs running nitrogen blowdown evaporation in borosilicate tubes day after day, that's a comfortable data point to already be on the right side of.
Where to Start If You're New to This
If your lab hasn't engaged with any of this yet, both guests pointed to the same starting sequence: energy first, because it's the easiest place to see fast, visible savings; then waste, using the actual waste hierarchy — prevent, reduce, reuse, and only then recycle — rather than treating recycling as the finish line. Sörme specifically called out three plastic categories worth auditing first: pipette tips and syringes, PPE like gloves and lab coats, and sample storage containers. Tackling those three before anything else, she said, gets most labs surprisingly far.
None of this requires abandoning rigor or cutting corners on health and safety — both guests were emphatic that ventilation rates and PPE use are non-negotiable, full stop. It's about removing the waste that was never serving the science in the first place.
I'll be sharing more from both of these conversations in upcoming episodes of Concentrating on Chromatography, including how we're thinking about Organomation's own path toward programs like ACT. If you're evaluating your lab's sample concentration setup with sustainability in mind, that's a conversation I'm always happy to have.