If you take medication for any health condition, chances are it was developed in a clinical research lab. These labs exist to advance human health and improve patient outcomes. Yet nationwide, these same labs use up to 10 times more energy and four times more water than office buildings of equivalent size, while generating an estimated 5.5 million metric tons of plastic waste each year. At CU Anschutz alone, research labs occupy more than 700,000 square feet. As institutions confront these realities, they are rethinking how labs can fulfill their research mission while reducing their environmental footprint.
In 2025, CU Anschutz launched the Green Labs Program to support more sustainable research practices campuswide. Through the initial ten-lab pilot, the Clinical Translational Research Center (CTRC) Core Lab became one of the campus’s first labs to earn the internationally recognized My Green Lab Certification. Part of the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI), the CTRC Core Lab supports hundreds of studies each year across the adult and pediatric Clinical Translational Research Centers.
The Green Labs Program works directly with campus labs using the My Green Lab Certification framework, a widely recognized standard for lab sustainability. The goal is to help labs examine their own workflows and identify practical changes that fit into their daily operations.
“CU Anschutz started a Green Labs Program to help our scientists align their operations with the campus mission of advancing human health,” explained Derek Cooper, who coordinates the program at CU Anschutz.
As part of the program, each lab receives a dashboard to track energy use and help identify opportunities for improvement. For the CTRC Core Lab, this process prompted them to take a closer look at their everyday practices and decisions.
“Participating in the Green Labs Program has made sustainability a more intentional part of our everyday decision making,” said Heidi Powell, program manager for the CTRC Core Lab. “It’s encouraged us to pause and ask simple but important questions about how we use energy, supplies and equipment, without disrupting the quality or pace of our work.”
Using their dashboard as a guide, the CTRC Core Lab implemented a series of changes focused on operating more sustainably, including:
While each of these actions may seem small on its own, together they added up to meaningful reductions in waste and energy use.
“The CTRC Core Lab’s actions have reduced their annual carbon footprint by over 27 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent per year,” Cooper said. “The majority of their interventions were low or no cost, which shows how accessible building a more sustainable lab can be.”
In December 2025, the CTRC Core Lab officially earned gold-level Green Lab Certification. The CTRC Core Lab assistant director, Rebecca Baldermann, is excited to continue reducing the lab’s environmental impact and working toward a higher level of certification.
Over time, these efforts also shifted the lab’s culture, sparking broader conversations about low-cost improvements and fostering a shared sense of ownership across the team.
Because of the pilot’s success, CU Anschutz is expanding the Green Labs Program to include an additional 50 labs. As one of the first labs to complete the certification process, the CTRC Core Lab will support other labs just getting started.
“I hope that because I was one of the pioneers, I can now be a mentor to support other labs and help them come up with sustainable solutions that work for them,” said Baldermann. “I’m hopeful that we can collaborate more as more labs go through this process.”
The Green Labs Program is part of CU Anschutz’s initiative to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Efforts like these are helping reshape how research labs think about their role in protecting both human and environmental health. Through the My Green Lab Certification Program, labs worldwide have reduced energy use by an average of 35%, cut waste by 75%, and saved more than 460,000 gallons of water each year.
“I think the world is finally looking at labs through an environmental lens,” said Baldermann. “I used to think that working in a lab meant unavoidable waste, that single use supplies and using excess materials were just part of the job. This initiative helped shift my mindset to, ‘No, we don’t have to settle for that. Let’s actually do something about it!’”