Elemental Machines, pioneer of the LabOps Intelligence Platform, is fighting climate change by recruiting scientists to enroll in The Freezer Challenge, an annual competition by nonprofit My Green Lab and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL) to help develop climate-friendly habits in millions of research labs worldwide. According to Elemental Machines’ latest sustainability report, each of those labs consumes five to ten times more energy per square foot than a typical office space.

The reason is that the labs producing the world’s life-changing medical and technical innovations use plenty of energy-intensive equipment like refrigerators, freezers, and cold rooms. Cold storage is likely one of the top categories of energy consumers in any lab.

For example, a single ultra-low temperature freezer can use as much energy as an average household every day. Out of an insight that this oversized consumption could be out of habit rather than intention, My Green Lab started The Freezer Challenge in 2017.

The first habit that will help a lab win the challenge is a periodic full defrost of freezers. That will earn participants a maximum of five points towards the final score in the challenge. Then there is the regular cleaning of filters, coils, and intakes; brushing frost from cabinet and door seals; updating inventories; keeping track of discarded samples and moving samples to warmer temperatures whenever possible.

“It can be done! Studies have shown that DNA samples stored between -20°C and -80°C were stable for over 24 months (and beyond). Try it out on a well plate or set of 25 tubes for credit in the Freezer Challenge!” said Constantin Fahom, Elemental Machines Business Development Executive in Europe, in one of the company’s weekly emails to the lab community.

It's a timely initiative because demands in labs are growing. According to Elemental Machines’ sustainability report, medical tests support around 70% of doctor decisions, and its use has grown by 5% annually in the US and Europe during the last decade. Similarly, investment in life science research and development surged 22% in 2019 from 2018 because of COVID-19, a trend that is likely to continue long after the pandemic. Most pharma or biotech labs with budgets greater than $1 million are spending on the kind of lab work that produced the COVID-19 life-saving tests, vaccines, and medicines our health depends on, such as cell-based analysis, genome analysis, and protein purification.

“The global biotechnology and pharma industry has a carbon footprint larger than the semiconductor industry, the forestry, and paper industry, and equal to nearly half the annual emissions of the UK,” says Elizabeth McGarry, a spokesperson at Elemental Machines. “Sustainable LabOps (laboratory operations) go beyond power consumption, like heating and cooling, because savings not only help shrink a lab’s carbon footprint but could also help bring about the next scientific breakthrough.”