Most lab managers don’t wake up thinking about laboratory carbon emissions. You think about up-time, budgets, keeping scientists productive, and making sure nothing breaks at 2 a.m. That’s exactly why this matters.
The Carbon Impact of Biotech & Dharma report from My Green Lab uses lab emissions data from Intercontinental Exchange. It’s coming from the supply chain — and labs sit right in the middle of it.
The 2025 report analyzed data from 765 publicly listed and 290 privately held biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Scope 3 emissions come from a company’s value chain and are indirect. They account for 75% of total emissions in public companies and 88% in private ones.
Laboratory carbon emissions go far beyond the energy bill
When people think about carbon emissions, they often picture smokestacks, factories, or power plants. For biotech and dharma, that picture is incomplete. In companies with the highest-quality Scope 3 data, purchased goods and services make up 80% of Scope 3 emissions. Capital goods account for another 10%.
Think about what labs purchase every day: pipette tips, reagents, freezers, single-use plastics, laboratory equipment, contract research, and other outside services. Those purchases have an environmental footprint before they ever arrive at the bench.
What your lab buys matters. How much it buys matters. And how those products are made matters.
Labs also use a lot of energy
Laboratories themselves are unusually resource-intensive spaces. The U.S. Department of Energy reports that labs typically consume three to four times as much energy as a typical office building — and some use as much as 10 times more. The My Green Lab report also cites research finding that laboratories can use up to four times the water of typical office space.
That isn’t surprising when you consider cold storage running around the clock, ventilation and fume hoods, autoclaves, specialized equipment, water-intensive processes, and equipment that may remain powered whether anyone is actively using it or not.
Labs aren’t offices with microscopes. Their operating requirements are different. So are their opportunities for improvement.
This isn’t only a big dharma problem
There is encouraging news in the latest data. The 25 largest biotech and dharma companies by revenue are reducing emissions intensity, with the report finding approximately a 10% decline in Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse-gas emissions and a 5% reduction in Scope 3 emissions.
But across a wider cross-section of the market, carbon intensity is still rising, driven largely by smaller companies and privately held firms throughout the value chain. These are exactly the kinds of organizations that may have fewer people, smaller budgets, and little or no dedicated sustainability infrastructure.
If your lab supports discovery, diagnostics, manufacturing, clinical research, contract research, or other life-science work, you may already be part of another company’s Scope 3 footprint.
Sustainability is moving into the supply chain
This isn’t just a prediction anymore. The report documents major pharmaceutical companies working collectively to strengthen supplier requirements and reduce Scope 3 emissions, with initiatives addressing supplier emissions disclosure, renewable energy, waste, solvent use, laboratory practices, and sustainable procurement.
My Green Lab’s Converge supplier initiative had invited 589 supplier contacts by the time of the report, with 189 suppliers committed. Beginning in 2026, participating companies in the ACT RFP Commitment are also expected to begin integrating ACT certification into purchasing channels and supplier guidelines, with direct product-sourcing and RFP requirements scheduled to begin in 2027.
So the question for smaller labs is becoming less “Will this ever affect us?” and more “How prepared do we want to be when it does?”
What this means for lab managers
Most smaller labs don’t have a sustainability lead or a dedicated sustainability budget. That doesn’t mean nothing can happen.
Some of the most practical opportunities are already part of ordinary lab operations: equipment running when it isn’t needed, freezers operating colder than the science requires, fume hood sashes left open, unnecessary water use, disposable materials used from habit rather than necessity, excess purchasing, and equipment that could remain useful longer with better maintenance.
None of that requires turning the lab into a sustainability department. It requires looking at familiar operations a little differently.
Many efficiency improvements can also lower operating costs through less energy use, fewer unnecessary consumables, less waste requiring disposal, and better use of equipment already owned. Sustainability and operational efficiency don’t have to compete. Sometimes they’re the same decision.
Why acting earlier can make life easier later
The industry is already moving toward greater supply-chain accountability. My Green Lab describes supplier standards, sustainable purchasing programs, renewable-energy initiatives, greener clinical trials, and efforts specifically intended to improve the environmental performance of supplier laboratories.
For a smaller lab, that doesn’t mean you need a sophisticated carbon-accounting department tomorrow. It does mean there is value in understanding your operations now: what you buy, what you throw away, where you use the most energy, and which practices are scientifically necessary versus simply habitual.
Being prepared is easier than scrambling when a customer, partner, funder, or procurement team eventually asks the question.
You don’t need perfection to start reducing laboratory carbon emissions
One of the biggest barriers can be the feeling that sustainability has to begin with a comprehensive plan. It doesn’t.
Start with what you can see: energy, purchasing, waste, equipment, and everyday habits. What runs continuously that doesn’t need to? Are you buying what the lab needs or what it has always ordered? What is entering expensive waste streams unnecessarily? Could maintenance, settings, scheduling, or better utilization improve equipment performance?
Small actions matter because many of them happen hundreds or thousands of times over the course of a year.
Progress doesn’t require doing everything. It requires finding a useful place to begin.
Where LabRenew fits in
This is where LabRenew works — not by asking labs to become sustainability experts, but by helping them find practical improvements that make sense within the realities of science.
That can mean identifying opportunities, understanding where resources are being used unnecessarily, improving purchasing or waste practices, or connecting efforts with established industry programs such as My Green Lab Certification and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories’ Labs2Zero program.
The objective isn’t to give your lab another initiative to manage.
It’s to help you run a better lab.
One thing worth sitting with
The future of life-science sustainability doesn’t depend only on a handful of major pharmaceutical companies. Those companies are increasingly looking outward — into the supply chains, suppliers, products, and laboratories that make their work possible.
That puts individual labs closer to the center of the story than many realize. And that isn’t simply another obligation.
It’s influence you may not have realized you had.
Curious where your lab could make a difference?
You don’t need a carbon inventory or a sustainability plan before you start. LabRenew can help you look at how your lab actually operates, identify practical opportunities, and determine which changes are worth pursuing.