Using World Environment Day to announce our Gold LEAF Award.
What is World Environment Day?
World Environment Day is recognised on 5 June yearly. It’s the largest global platform for environmental public outreach and this year’s theme is climate action. Led by the United Nations Environment Programme, 2026 focuses on the urgent signals the Earth is sending and the signals we choose to send back.
Positive tipping points are taking root in every corner of the planet.
What is LEAF?
The Lab Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) awards target laboratory sustainability and efficiency across research areas to improve the environmental impact of our lab work.
The award was developed as a framework of actions for waste, chemicals, equipment and more. We follow this framework to reduce water, plastic, energy and other resource consumption, to reduce our lab carbon emissions and support research quality. The University of Liverpool have a page that explains more about the University’s LEAF work.
The Bronze LEAF Award is operational and sets a baseline for what needs to be done. It’s grounded in what all labs should be doing as a starting point to health and safety and making sure regular communication about sustainability are embedded in lab practice.
Silver and Gold LEAF Awards are more specific to each lab and are distinct in their depth of information and evidence. Rather than stating what labels and signage are in use, being able to demonstrate how guidance is followed is key. This can include ‘tell me about reuse of plastics and consumables’, ‘show me how you maintain freezers and how you store within your fume hoods’, ‘tell me how you recirculate water’.
Why are labs an important area for environmental efforts?
While laboratory-based research is key for scientific advancement it is responsible for around 2% of the world’s plastic waste. Lab space also uses 3-10 times more resources than typical office space of the same size through energy, water and waste.
LEAF is a user-driven, non-profit framework, that was set up to meet the lack of standards in place and provide guidance on making labs more environmentally sustainable.
The Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics – Global Health (CELT Global Health), and its co-directors Professors Andrew Owen and Steve Rannard, has committed to the University of Liverpool’s LEAF goals. We want to ensure that beneficiaries of our long-acting research and development will have as healthy a world to live in as we can help provide.
We wrote a blog about our efforts in 2025 as we had just received the Silver LEAF Award for all our labs. It explains all the small changes and behaviours we implemented to get there and our plans for our next steps.
We’re so pleased that since that piece, our chemistry labs have continued to ensure the high standards required to keep their Silver LEAF Award, and our pharmacology labs have achieved the Gold LEAF Award. There were various steps towards this milestone, so we spoke to Jenna Lowe, University of Liverpool’s Laboratory Sustainability Officer to learn exactly what helped get us here.
What steps did CELT’s pharmacology labs take for the Gold LEAF Award?
CELT Global Health’s Senior Lab Technician Anthony Valentijn and Research Technician Helen Cox have worked extremely hard to ensure our key research in long-acting medicines has as little environmental impact as we can achieve.
The work for the Gold Award is broken into categories and here’s a breakdown of how we’ve tackled each one.
Reuse of materials and consumables to reduce waste
- In our work re-using lab materials can be hard due to methodological requirements. We use glass wherever we can, but we currently will always need to use some single-use items in order to avoid contamination
- We’ve increased recycling, including recycling the boxes for our tips and media bottles.
Travel and adopting low carbon policies where possible
- Lots of our meetings occur online, and where that’s feasible it’s our chosen option
- Anyone who attends a conference in person is because they’re presenting
- For UK events, we use public transport wherever possible.
Equipment
- We use LEDs for microscopy illumination
- We still have some older microscopes that aren’t compatible with LEDs, but it’s something we’re making sure of with new product purchases.
Excess materials and equipment
- ISMIB, the institute CELT Global Health sits in, have a workshop for fixing broken equipment we use rather than having to buy new if something breaks
- When something isn’t repairable, we send it for parts. We had two autoclaves that were no longer serviceable, so they were sent to a company who can use the working parts rather than sending them to landfill
- We share equipment internally, by lending our equipment to other research groups they avoid needing to purchase their own
- We are part of the Unigreen scheme to sell equipment no longer needed
- We use the Warp It listing site within the University of Liverpool to redistribute items we no longer use. This also lists costs savings and carbon savings so users can see the differences made by using the system.
Promoting use of existing data and samples from biobanks rather than generating new
- The data we generate in CELT Global Health is sensitive, so we’re often unable to share it
- However, we have our own modelling team who use publicly available datasets rather than generating new in-house data
- Modelling helps us reduce the number of experiments we have to run as it predicts what will and won’t be effective. This allows us to limit physical research to examples we have a good idea will work before we start and don’t waste resources on those it’s likely won’t.
Sample chemical management
- At least 85% of chemicals we bring in are used, they are all stored properly and are easily identifiable
- We use ChemInventory for our chemicals
- All our samples are catalogued on a spreadsheet on a SharePoint site that all relevant staff can access and update.
Lab management software
- The University of Liverpool don’t have a one-fits-all software option as each lab’s needs are different from each other
- We use ChemInventory for chemicals
- We use SafetyNet for health and safety, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and control of substances hazardous to health (COSHH) documents
- We have Sharepoint and Teams sites for documents and equipment booking
- All ISMIB equipment is tracked on RFID asset tracking and management system.
Sterilisation and cleanliness methods – avoiding excess
- We utilise UV sterilisation on tissue culture hoods. We only run this once a day and use an automatic timer to ensure it can’t be left running for extended periods of time
- Regulations dictate which products we sterilise our pharmacology labs with
- Items cleaned in the autoclave are overseen by our autoclave management team.
Appropriate use of sinks and drains
- Induction includes risk assessment and COSHH forms, so all new staff learn and document how to dispose of chemicals.
Selecting green solvents to avoid solvent evaporation
- Where possible, we try to select chemicals that have a better safety profile and a lower environmental impact
- ‘Green' solvents don’t mean we don't evaporate the solvent into the atmosphere
- For drug analysis we mostly dry the samples by evaporating into the atmosphere, via nitrogen gas through the fume hood, but the volumes used are kept to a minimum
- Our centrifugal drier in the lab, used in sample preparation for bioanalysis with our liquid chromatography mass-spectrometer, captures and disposes of evaporated solvents via the approved waste disposal method
- The stability of the drug dictates which of the two methods will be used.
Office spaces
- Correct recycling bins are available everywhere they’re needed
- We encourage limited printing and use black and white rather than colour wherever possible.
Previous award maintenance
Aiming for the Gold LEAF Award doesn’t mean we didn’t have work to do maintaining our Bronze and Silver standards. We had to maintain the criteria for both before we could move up. This year there were some extra requirements for them.
Silver Award maintenance
- The audit checked the state of our freezers. We have a maintenance checklist for our ultra-low temperature freezers. All our freezers were well maintained, with no ice build-up and the seals were all clear. The freezers were well racked, and we have sample maps on the front for what is in each, where it is and whose samples are where
- Our fume hoods were checked. We had no excess storage inside, they were clear and well maintained, and sashes are closed when not used
- All the equipment in the labs were turned off that weren’t in use.
Bronze Award maintenance
- We had to evidence our waste disposal SOPs
- ISMIB include a sustainability induction on SafetyNet
- They checked procurement, as they used to ask about procuring energy efficient equipment and they knew about how ISMIB stores orders work, but we had to explain our orders outside of stores. These all go through one person who can oversee it, this helps avoid multiple orders when items can be shared across teams or ordering items we already have
- We have labels throughout the labs we use, and hazard stickers are available. The audit picked up on our colour coding systems that make labelling drugs easily identifiable. If any part of the label has rubbed off the colour still helps us identify it.
Where do we go from Gold?
We’ll now try to sustain this Gold Award at each audit. Every time there will be new questions within the document to work towards.
There’s always more that can be done and things that can be changed, so we’ll always strive to keep working on that. The University of Liverpool have set a target for all university labs to be Gold by 2031.
Why is a Gold LEAF Award important?
We want our labs to be as sustainable as possible. We’re seeing increasingly that funders are asking for LEAF awards as a requirement, including organisations such as Wellcome trust and Cancer Research UK.
We must provide our labs with the tools they need to keep Gold. While there may be funder requirements, we make these efforts because we want to and know how important it is. This resonates around the University of Liverpool, and other institutions are noticing how much LEAF work is being done here.
More University of Liverpool labs have Silver and Gold LEAF Awards than Bronze now, and it’s brilliant to see our combined efforts to do better. Our research is all about helping people, communities, society and the world, but we all have to do what we can to ensure it is a healthy place to live for those we are trying to help.
#NowForClimate #WorldEnvironmentDay