Accelerating Lab Sustainability: Insights on Cultural Change from the International Laboratory Freezer Challenge

         

Grassroots initiatives, often spearheaded by passionate individuals or small groups deeply committed to sustainability, demonstrate remarkable impact. Success is frequently driven by dedicated volunteers who operate well beyond expectations. This was highlighted at Southwest Pathology Services (SPS), a joint venture between SYNLAB, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, and Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in the UK, which won a Clinical Lab Award. Two team members who volunteered over a holiday weekend were instrumental to their success, according to Lucy Tustin, team manager in Microbiology, and embody the spirit of grassroots commitment. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), winner of a Government Organization Award, attributes their success to similar volunteer efforts. Participation to date has been driven by passionate researchers and lab managers “who put in extra work to take this on as another duty while still completing their lab requirements,” says Jaro Sebek, environmental engineer in the Sustainability Branch of the Division of Environmental Protection (Office of Research Facilities).

"We simply do not have time to wait for top-down changes, and this was an example of a bottom-up way to change within the hospital."

Passionate individuals can serve as a rallying point for labs. James Leatherman, lab manager for the Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee GI Oncology lab at Johns Hopkins Medicine (winner of an Academic Lab Award), shared how his learning of over 1,500 ultra-low temperature freezers at the university inspired him to act. His enthusiasm and the support of Jaffee galvanized the lab to contribute. Sharon Sember, a technologist in the Immunologic Monitoring and Cellular Products Laboratory at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center (winner of another Clinical Lab Award), became a focal point for her team’s efforts. Her dedication and initiative significantly improved inventory management in the lab and earned her the nickname “Freezer Queen," according to teammate Lauren Saleh, senior specialty laboratory technologist. 

         

Grassroots efforts can better engage peers and create a more widespread culture of stewardship through bottom-up influence. The Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), recipient of the Clinical Winning Streak Award, notes the role their grassroots efforts have played in their success. “Where we aren’t currently a supported program, our grassroots and volunteer-led BCH Green Labs group has a ‘can-do/ go get ‘em’ attitude. We hung posters, sent out emails, and championed the labs to defrost their freezers,” explains Chuck Blanchette, research operations capital equipment manager, and Valentina Lagomarsino, PhD candidate, at BCH. Nick Ciancio, sustainability coordinator, and Emily Colpack, Green Labs coordinator, credit this same passion and dedication exemplified by participating researchers for their progress at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), which won an Academic Organization Award. 

         

A major reason for the success of grassroots efforts is the ability for anyone to make a difference, enabling immediate action. “Participation in the Freezer Challenge gives everyone an opportunity to identify and share improvements and to reduce their carbon footprint,” says Travis Lyle, the global director of Biorepository Services, Central Laboratory Services, at Labcorp, winner of a Biotech Biorepository Award.

Lagomarsino eloquently sums up the passion and effectiveness of their grassroots initiative: “It has felt empowering to win. This win was solely accomplished by volunteers and a grassroots organization of scientists who want to make their science more sustainable. We simply do not have time to wait for top-down changes, and this was an example of a bottom-up way to change within the hospital.”

The influence of leadership

       

Effective leadership plays an equally pivotal role in fostering a sustainability culture. By endorsing initiatives like the Freezer Challenge, leadership can validate and amplify their importance. Catherine McCarney, senior technical officer in the Vet Anatomy Dissection Lab of University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland, which won an Academic Biorepository Award, highlights the influence of their chief technical officer. Mary Sekiya serves as their “sustainability champion and ambassador, brings such energy and enthusiasm to the table, [and] gently encourages the staff as a whole to get behind all manner of sustainability initiatives.” 

Leaders can allocate resources, enact policies, and entrench an organizational culture that prioritizes sustainability. Corporate strategies like Amgen’s 2027 Sustainability Plan and AstraZeneca’s sustainability focus underscore the impact of top-down approaches. Amgen, which received a Biotech Winning Streak Award, incorporates sustainability by design in their policies, “embedding sustainability into our culture and integrating it into our business decisions—at all levels,” says Joanie Burns, Environment, Health, Safety, and Sustainability manager. This ensures alignment throughout the organization on their goals, despite multiple layers of decision-making. AstraZeneca, winner of a Biotech Organization Award, takes a similar approach, centering the fundamental need to take action to drive sustainability. They focus on “creating a culture of sustainability and changing mindsets” to ensure they operate in the most environmentally sustainable way possible, says Andrew King, PhD, Health, Safety, and Environment director for Global Quality Operations.

         

Many organizations find that their scientists want to reduce their environmental footprint and leadership can enable action on the ground level by leveraging a myriad of tools. “On UAB’s campus, we have found that individuals want to practice sustainable cold storage practices but often feel unsupported,” Ciancio and Colpack explain. Many winners of organizational-level awards in the Freezer Challenge sustain their own ‘green labs’ programs internally. Leatherman describes the empowerment offered by such an opportunity, “The invitation to join [the] newly formed Sustainability Leadership Council and Green Labs Working Group for the university felt like a chance [to] get involved and to give staff a voice.” AstraZeneca further equips their labs with resources including ‘lunch and learns,’ knowledge quizzes, digital tools presenting return of investment for efforts, and repurposed safety applications that enable sustainability assessments of work environments, according to King. Organizations like Labcorp have found that building supports in line with their sustainability agenda allows initiatives like the challenge to be owned at the lab level.

By endorsing initiatives like the Freezer Challenge, leadership can validate and amplify their importance.

“Frequent communication is key," notes Lyle. “We try to communicate regularly around sustainability initiatives and how they tie into the big picture.” 

AstraZeneca similarly stresses the importance of communication. King explains that the company has taken “more focused approaches to ensure the communications and campaigns relate to the roles, responsibilities, and opportunities of the individuals.”

         

Flipping the script can also accelerate changes in lab culture. Jörg Hamann, PhD, head of the Amsterdam University Medical Centers (UMC) Biobank (winner of a Clinical Biorepository Award) reports that UMC now targets -70°C as the standard temperature for long-term sample storage. Hamann relays that asking collection owners to justify the need for -80°C storage—rather than supplying arguments for -70°C storage—enabled success by minimizing pushback. “In the end, the transition went very smoothly.” 

Synergy of grassroots and leadership

The most effective cultural shifts in sustainability occur when grassroots initiatives and leadership intertwine. Leadership can provide the necessary support and legitimacy, while grassroots movements can ensure that initiatives are practical, well-received, and enthusiastically supported by the wider community. Madhu Khanna, the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund chair and director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), which received an Academic Winning Streak Award, notes the pride researchers take in leading the way for sustainable lab practices with record-setting results. “And we expect to enhance and expand those efforts: A committee charged by vice chancellor for Research & Innovation Susan Martinis...will work on further recommendations.”

         

Growing investment from all parties compounds impact beyond regular improvements achieved with annual participation in the Freezer Challenge. Ciancio and Colpack note that investing savings achieved from the challenge into other sustainable practices expands their work. Paul Foote, energy efficiency and conservation specialist with Facilities and Services at UIUC, expands on ongoing improvements to best practices attributed to the Freezer Challenge. In particular, after six years of success in the competition, “researchers have incorporated tracking mechanisms into their routines” that make both recruitment and participation easier.

Feedback from the grassroots level helps leadership refine policies and strategies, which in turn facilitates the growth of grassroots initiatives.

Leadership plays a crucial role in scaling solutions from grassroots initiatives organization-wide. “Fostering engagement and driving change across departments really does require an all-hands-on-deck approach,” says Burns. “We have a network of environmental sustainability (ES) ambassadors, with teams at the site, function and sub-function levels, and we have a global ES ambassadors team to ensure that crucial cross-functional sharing of ideas and experience.” She further explains that every function now incorporates the Freezer Challenge in their sustainability strategies, having seen the contributions. Sebek also attributes success at NIH to centralizing sustainability efforts through teams, facilitating crossover between initiatives. In particular, challenge participants “took their energy to other areas through the Green Labs Program” and vice versa. Sharing the results of participants in the challenge across a wider platform inspires other labs to engage, and many winners have been offered opportunities to present their work in larger forums.

         

         

Feedback from the grassroots level helps leadership refine policies and strategies, which in turn facilitates the growth of grassroots initiatives. Many winners noted that participation in the Freezer Challenge prompted more ambitious targets or strengthened investment in sustainability from leadership. According to Burns, the involvement of individual labs has prompted a broader operational shift: “We are looking at our cold storage practices and infrastructure more wholistically and assessing how we can make systemic changes and improvements to make inventory management easier and more efficient while also saving energy and reducing costs.” Hamman believes that the sustainability efforts will be solidified and embedded in their work as a key performance indicator moving forward. 

         

At BCH, Lagomarsino says they requested savings from the Freezer Challenge be invested in green initiatives. “In 2022 we wrote an open letter to our administration asking for more support and resources to help our research be as sustainable as it can be…being able to use the freezer challenge victory has helped a lot.”

Cultural shift and community building

Initiatives like My Green Lab and I²SL's Freezer Challenge not only promote sustainability but also foster a sense of community. Both leadership and grassroots participants contribute to this by encouraging collaboration, sharing best practices, and celebrating achievements. This community aspect is essential for sustaining long-term commitment to these goals. Many challenge winners describe cultural change rooted in team engagement and comradery, establishing new routines, and motivation to adopt sustainable practices.

         

McCarney describes the change in culture within her team, who have become very attuned to the noises freezers make. “Their ability to walk past the large container freezers and comment on whether they are making a slightly louder hum or a small almost indiscernible rattle has made me smile.” The challenge has introduced both a fun, collaborative team effort and a “shared responsibility for identifying problems early on.” Blanchette describes a similar cultural shift among BCH labs, as annual freezer maintenance transitions from monotonous to fun, getting easier each time. “The task is becoming a healthy habit. And when good habits become routine...there’s your culture change.” A culture change is well underway at AstraZeneca as well, according to King. “With enhanced ownership and focus at the lab level, we are seeing behavioural and performance changes in our ways of working. The success of the freezer challenge is prompting both leaders and scientists to further examine our business-as-usual activities, changing mindsets and habits.”

As Khanna reports, “Success breeds success. Our six straight years of accomplishment in energy savings and GHG reductions in the freezer challenge have increased our sense of pride in our university—along with a community-wide sense of purpose to do even more to be sustainable.”

         

Sometimes external influences motivate sustainability action, such as governmental climate action mandates and limited resources stemming from last year’s energy crisis in Europe, though it’s clear that underlying passion builds these cultural shifts. “Being more sustainable is a win-win for everyone and such practices are now embedded in our laboratory,” says Kilcoyne. 

The 2023 Freezer Challenge illustrates that effective sustainability in laboratories results from a blend of grassroots enthusiasm and strategic leadership. Grassroots actions capture leadership attention, influencing policy and strategy, while leadership empowers these initiatives, providing support and legitimacy. This collaborative approach amplifies impact, with initiatives like the Freezer Challenge serving as a platform for sharing best practices and fostering a sense of community.

         

As an annual competition, the Freezer Challenge is back in 2024. Participation is open from January 1 to June 30, and any lab across the world that has cold storage can sign up to participate entirely virtually and for free.

The Freezer Challenge is made possible by corporate sponsors of this program. In 2023, the supporting sponsors were Eppendorf, Stirling Ultracold, Elemental Machines, Gilead, Amgen, PHCbi, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and B Medical Systems.