My Green Lab crowns procurement 'superheroes'

Laboratory sustainability sounds like a facilities story at first — freezers, fume hoods, energy bills, waste bins. But the real action is shifting upstream, into purchasing. That was the big point of My Green Lab’s Europe Summit in March 2026, and it’s why the group started talking about procurement people like “superheroes.” The claim sounds a little cheesy. But turns out the logic is pretty solid: if most of a lab’s footprint sits in the supply chain, the people choosing suppliers and products have outsized power. ### Why make procurement the hero? Because labs do not just emit carbon through the electricity they use on-site. A huge share comes from everything they buy — instruments, plastics, chemicals, packaging, shipping, and disposal. At the summit, that was framed as the hidden engine of sustainability. In pharma and life sciences, Scope 3 emissions often make up more than 90% of a company’s footprint, and purchased goods and services are one of the biggest chunks procurement teams can influence. (mygreenlab.org) ### What actually happened at the summit? My Green Lab’s Europe Summit 2026 ran on March 19 as a virtual event under the theme “Eye of the Storm.” The organization is still offering the recording through a registration page, which matters because this was not just a one-off pep talk. It was pitched as a working session on how regulation, industry leadership, and trusted data are pushing sustainability from a voluntary extra into market infrastructure for life sciences across Europe. (labmanager.com) ### Why Europe, specifically? Because Europe is where a lot of sustainability pressure is getting operationalized first. The summit’s framing was that environmental performance is becoming visible, measurable, and comparable in a way that changes how products are designed and how supply chains function. Basically, this is the shift from “we have a climate target” to “show me the product-level data and the supplier plan.” That is a much more procurement-shaped problem. (mygreenlab.regfox.com) ### What makes procurement more than a paperwork function? Procurement sits at the point where ambition turns into contracts. That means supplier engagement, bid requirements, preferred-product lists, and the quiet threat of losing business. One AstraZeneca procurement leader described moving beyond encouragement to accountability — by the end of 2024, about 50% of the company’s spend was with suppliers that had Science Based Targets initiative-validated targets, and the company had a process for walking away from suppliers that resisted setting them. (living-future.eu) ### But how do buyers compare “green” products? That is where My Green Lab’s ACT Ecolabel comes in. It is built to give procurement teams standardized, third-party verified sustainability data at the product level, so they can compare options without relying on vague marketing claims. My Green Lab says the label is the only ecolabel for lab equipment and supplies that provides that kind of verified purchasing data, and it now covers products from more than 70 manufacturers. (labmanager.com) ### Why does data matter so much here? Because labs buy thousands of things, and intuition is bad at spotting the biggest footprint. One example highlighted after the summit came from procurement-record analysis at Uppsala University: just five product categories made up more than 80% of single-use plastic by weight, and hazardous-waste bins alone accounted for 31% while representing only 7% of cost. That is the whole point of better procurement data — it shows where small buying changes can move a lot of material. (mygreenlab.org) ### Is this bigger than one summit? Yes — My Green Lab has been building the plumbing around this idea. It offers a procurement training module, pushes the ACT label as a buying tool, and runs Converge, a supplier-engagement initiative for pharma backed by companies including AstraZeneca, GSK, Amgen, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb. So the “superhero” language is really a way of selling a broader shift: procurement is becoming one of the main control panels for lab decarbonization. (labmanager.com) ### Bottom line My Green Lab’s message is simple — if labs want real emissions cuts, they cannot stop at behavior inside the lab. They have to change what gets bought, who gets approved, and what data counts. That puts procurement in the middle of the story, whether the buyers asked for a cape or not. (living-future.eu) (mygreenlab.org)