S-Lab: Safe, Successful and Sustainable Laboratories

The S-Lab programme aims to create more sustainable laboratories, and to raise sustainability awareness amongst lab-using staff and students (see the Overview section for more discussion of this). It is mainly financed by the four UK higher education funding bodies (HEFCE, HEFCW, SFC and DELNI) through the Leadership, Governance and Management fund, with additional support from the Carbon Trust and others. It has three streams of work:

• Laboratory design (working in partnership with owners and suppliers, and in collaboration with the US Labs 21 initiative);
  
• Laboratory operation (working closely with lab managers and technicians);
  
• Laboratory users (working closely with staff and students). 

S-Lab emphasises the synergies between safety, business success and sustainability rather than compartmentalising and/or seeing them as competing with each other. Although its centre of gravity is in universities, it also supports action in private and public sector laboratories, and is keen to build links with them.

Current S-Lab activities include:

• Running events to profile good practice, discuss key issues and develop networks;
  
• Continuing HEEPI's benchmarking of laboratory energy and water consumption (see publications page for past outputs);
  
• Development of an Excel footprinting tool to support benchmarking - this is currently being developed in conjuction with the Universities of Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester Universiies and has a provisional availability of summer 2010;
  
• Development of a laboratory self-assessment framework and tool to gauge economic, environmental and social performance;
  
• Monitoring the use of the BREEAM Higher Education laboratory credits which HEEPI helped to develop,  with the aim of informing a 2010 review; and
  
• Working with partners to develop a European proposal to undertake similar activities within the European Union.