Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics’ environmental impact milestone for Sustainability Week 2025

Posted on: 24 February 2025 by Rebecca Derrick in Developing the Long-acting Pipeline

The Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics’ (CELT) laboratories have all achieved a Lab Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) Silver award.

CELT research comprises several disciplines as we’re a cross-faculty team. In our work towards creating long-acting versions of existing medications, under the co-directorship of Professor Andrew Owen and Professor Steve Rannard, our labs are tailored to the specific research that happens in them, so we have both pharmacology and chemistry labs.

In September 2023 one of our pharmacology labs received a Bronze award, in March 2024 after a further audit all CELT pharmacology labs were awarded the Silver award. Excitingly, our chemistry lab applied for Bronze and Silver together and were successful in the Silver award in June 2024. With the pharmacology labs receiving Silver again in our recent re-audit, all CELT’s labs have a Silver LEAF award just in time for the University of Liverpool’s Sustainability Week running 24-28 February 2025.

What are the LEAF awards?

LEAF has ambitious goals, targeting laboratory work in all research fields to do better and reduce the negative impact lab work has on the environment.

The award was developed as a framework of actions for waste, chemicals, equipment, etc. Lab users follow this framework to reduce water, plastic, energy and other resource consumption, helping labs to reduce their carbon emissions and support research quality. You can read more about the University of Liverpool’s LEAF work here.

Why are the LEAF awards a consideration in laboratory research?

The LEAF awards have been developed from a better understanding of the environmental impact of laboratories in research. By the nature of what we use them for, labs are highly energy and resource intensive, sometimes requiring 4x more water and 10x more electricity than running the same sized space within a standard office.

We are all aware of the paramount nature of labs within the medical research field. While this research is key to the lives and survival of many people, it’s important that it doesn’t cost us the earth. When 99% of a lab’s footprint lies with single use items, due to risk of contamination and reducing autoclave usage, then procedural changes are required via bottom-up sustainability. Considering sustainable processes can make a significant difference; from research design that avoids the need to repeat experiments, through to materials supplied and labelling within a lab space.

CELT has committed to the University’s LEAF goals to ensure that beneficiaries of our long-acting research and development will also have as healthy a world to live in as we can help provide.

What changes did CELT labs make that lead to our Silver awards?

CELT’s lab teams have always been conscientious of our environmental impact, already making efficiencies in the labs including reducing plastic usage, centralising chemical storage, and ordering in bulk to reduce the number of deliveries. Sandra Pereira Cachinho from the Institute of Systems Molecular Integrative Biology (ISMIB) approached our pharmacology labs’ Senior Technician about LEAF, specifically the Bronze award. It was a good opportunity to formalise what we were doing and adopt additional practices to make more efficiencies in the laboratory.

When CELT’s pharmacology lab team applied for the Bronze award in 2023 it was because we already had everything in place to meet the criteria, so the award set a strong baseline to build from. However, our pharmacology labs were already working to achieve the Silver award and intended to apply for that audit as soon as we could, and our chemistry lab was able to skip Bronze and apply straight for the Silver award.

Silver is a more lab specific award than Bronze, as every lab is different due to its goals, functions, equipment, and staff. The University of Liverpool set a target that all labs would achieve Bronze by September 2024 and that 50% will be Silver by September 2025. CELT are beyond the expected timeline as it was important to do what we could as soon as we could.

Staff resources

The audit picked up on an array of efforts, from tangible outputs to staff resources. For the latter, we include environmental considerations in our lab within induction materials and lab tours for new staff. Our chemistry lab inductions were noted for the tour including what should and shouldn’t be switched off at the end of the day and excellent fume hood tutoring.

On the opposite side to induction, exit surveys for staff moving teams or roles are important in our Silver awards. When a staff member leaves, our teams have strong processes in place for either moving responsibility or removing their samples. This means we don’t have constant storage of samples that build up over time and become unwieldy.

CELT’s pharmacology staff sit within the University’s Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology (ISMIB), which has a sustainability group that the pharmacology lab technicians are part of, meaning that staff buy-in comes from, and is encouraged by, peers. While there isn’t a sustainability group within the chemistry department, CELT’s chemistry team discuss sustainable practice with other groups and departments, to show what our LEAF practices are and why they were helpful in our team. This includes practices such as the monthly Tidy Friday, where the whole team work together to check freezers, storage and equipment functions, and back up hard drives and cameras to free up space and protect against data loss. This ensures we avoid having to repeat experiments, due to lost data or faulty equipment. Noticing equipment malfunctions early is important for efficiency in lab spaces.

Re-using lab materials

CELT’s labs in the William Henry Duncan Building have dramatically reduced single use pipette tips and vial lids, deciding to use as much glass over plastic options as possible within our work. In our chemistry lab this includes and weigh boats. Both these items still require single use sometimes, however studies show the carbon footprint of single use glass items is much smaller than plastic counterparts and we use paper weigh boats in instances of single use. CELT’s pharmacology labs reuse many glass items without contamination using an autoclave.  Research from Martin Farley and Nicolet Benoit shows that repeatedly using an autoclave is significantly better for the environment than using single use plastics. This conclusion was based on the holistic journey from delivery to end of life and has reduced running costs even when considering additional staff time.

Obviously, there are items where single use plastic is unavoidable due to nature of the research, such as sometimes requiring plastic cuvettes for analysis. Sometimes any contamination from a less than perfect autoclave clean would contaminate future projects, which would cause different environmental concerns due to repeating experiments. What’s been important in CELT’s labs is understanding where re-using materials isn’t avoidable to concentrate on improving all the areas where it is.

Repairing and Recycling

Maintenance service contracts are key to our lab sustainability, so if anything breaks it can be fixed quickly. This reduces running costs on energy intensive equipment malfunctions and reduces how often new equipment purchases are required as faults in current equipment are avoided.

There isn’t a lot of equipment recycling available in our fields, but we do what we can. Our chemistry team has spent time, when a company we work with can’t recycle something, looking to find another company that will. The LEAF audit spotlighted the effort made to repair our broken equipment before resorting to replacements.

Packaging is an area of frustration, as we order glass consumables to reduce our environmental impact, but it often arrives in neither recyclable or reusable packaging; such as cuvettes arriving in polystyrene holders. We’ve checked with the companies, and they don’t use commercial polystyrene recycling or take them back for re-use, so the only available outcome is their becoming waste. We’re careful with these consumables to reduce the need for further deliveries of difficult packaging.

Waste

We have various bins for different types of waste and recycling in all our labs. The audit not only looks at signage around waste disposal in a lab but includes checking the various bins for cross contamination. The signage in CELT labs is clear and in all waste areas, this meant we had no cross contamination of waste within any bins in any of our labs.

Water

Sustainability of water in labs is a difficult area to tackle, but there are small things CELT have done to try and make a difference. We use two grades of water in our labs, distilled and ultrapure, but there is signage on each tap to show what type of water it is as well as what each type of water should be used for.

It takes 5 litres of distilled water to make one litre of ultrapure, so using it for the wrong purpose has large implications for our waste and energy consumption. These signs help prevent accidental usage of higher-grade water when less energy intensive water would do. CELT’s chemistry labs includes signage of what to do if you notice a leak or drip, so the impact is reduced as quickly as possible.

Energy

Everything that can be switched off when our labs aren’t in use is, and there are clear labels on the equipment about it. The drying oven in our chemistry lab needs to be 45 °C during the lab’s working hours, but our team put effort into sourcing one with a timer so it can run at room temperature when not in use. This means that the energy consumption required to keep it running at 45 °C is only required during operational hours.

Freezers

A large area of energy waste within labs comes from freezers, especially as CELT use ultra-low temperature freezers. These freezers create temperatures down to –80 °C for storing biological samples and other sensitive materials. CELT’s freezer work was a big help in our meeting the requirement for Silver award due to several factors.

• CELT freezers are well spaced and well organised with no ice on the seals. There is a record of what is in each freezer and where each item is, reducing the time freezer doors are open
• CELT’s chemistry labs don’t need lower temperature freezers, so don’t use them
• Defrosted annually, our chemistry lab freezers have a sign on them for when they were last defrosted and when they next need to be
• ISMIB use energy monitors on our freezers to see if changing a freezer from –80 °C to –70 °C would make a difference and it has created huge saving on some freezers
• ISMIB is already working on effective freezer calibration to combat the common problem of the monitor on the door not reflecting the real temperature inside
• CELT has backup freezers ready in case of a breakdown or a freezer becoming ineffective. We can stop using an ineffective freezer immediately.

Organisation of teams and space

There are several things the ISMIB and overall CELT teams have put in place to keep our labs organised that aid our environmental efficiency and therefore sustainability. These include:

• Sample labelling systems so we know what all samples are and who they belong to
• Weekly meetings occur in CELT’s chemistry team to discuss who is using what equipment at what time to maximise efficiency of the space. We have an equipment booking system and our teams meet weekly to check through how everyone will work with equipment together
• We seek to use open access equipment and facilities when we only need to use equipment for limited experiments
• CELT’s pharmacology team uses cloud-based software system, to manage and enable sharing of chemicals. If we only need a small amount of stock, seeing if other teams have enough for us to use means we avoid ordering large quantities of something that could become waste
• CELT fume hoods’ sashes are always closed, and no items are needlessly stored in them. Our chemistry fume hood has necessary items in baskets that are hung up inside, so the air flow isn’t impacted, and the fume hood runs efficiently.

Some of these material and staff resource changes and commitments understandably required more work than others, but together even smaller tasks added up to a lot of work to implement.

Why is the Silver award achievement important to CELT?

The University are setting the target for 50% of labs to be Silver by September 2025. We’ve driven for this achievement because we wanted to rather than because we were told, as we believe in what LEAF is trying to achieve.

While we now have a nationally recognised award to show our endeavouring efforts towards our own sustainability, this award has steered us to make changes with a large impact on our sustainability and costs. The audit helped create a pattern of habitually documenting our environmental work, which in turn allowed us to see patterns within our lab, pass on new ideas to other teams and vice versa.

Labs, including CELT’s, are a drain on resources both environmentally and financially, so reducing that is paramount to our environmental and organisational sustainability.

What are the next steps for CELT?

The LEAF audit is yearly, so we will continue to work towards achieving Silver each year as we’ve set ourselves a high benchmark from the start. Remaining at the Silver award level will still require work and documentation to show our continued commitment.

LEAF has a gold award but, as things currently stand, it would be difficult for larger labs like CELT’s to achieve it. However, there are things happening in the background at the University that will help our ambition to achieve gold.

We want to thank CELT’s Senior Lab Technician Anthony Valentijn, Research Technician Helen Cox and CELT’s entire chemistry team, for their extremely hard work to make sure CELT’s key research in long-acting medicines has as little environmental impact as we can achieve. Their joint efforts are the driving force around CELT achieving a Silver LEAF award before the University expected us to even aim for Bronze. We also want to thank Jenna Lowe and the University of Liverpool’s LEAF team for their excellent support and unwavering determination.

All the efforts listed above have been implemented or overseen by our lab teams to make sure there’s a holistic effort to improve our waste and overall footprint. We want to save people lives, but we also know how important it is that they have a world to live them in.

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