Sylow Group får GULD: Læs deres refleksioner

Read the Sylow Group's great insights on their gold achievement: 

"One of the many sustainability initiatives taken here at the University of Copenhagen is the greenification of labs. At a department such as ours, where most research revolves around lab work, the labs are of course extremely important and highly valued.

They are, however, also quite costly to run in terms of energy consumption – they consume 3-10 times more energy per m2 than regular office space.

To bring down the environmental footprint of our labs, many of them are joining the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF), which operates with three certification levels; bronze, silver, and gold. Thanks to a great effort from several dedicated team members such as PhD student Emma Helene Frank Larsen and lab tech student Katrine Mosegaard, the Sylow Group led by Associate Professor Lykke Sylow has been a frontrunner in this race, and now they've gotten the gold!

While almost all labs can achieve a bronze certification with just some minor adaptations (meaning there's no excuses to not getting started!), a gold certification does require changing several procedures and habits both in the lab and offices.

They do, however, make complete sense in more than just one way – a laptop in sleep mode uses more power than one that's turned off. So changing the habit of which button you press before going home can save some energy. But the heat also wears down the components faster, and depending on the model and setup, transporting a PC in sleep mode may also damage the different parts, further straining the components and thus shortening the life of the PC. 

From conserving energy to extending the lifespan of equipment, LEAF isn't just about saving our environment, it also focuses on work efficiency and saving money for more groundbreaking research - and you know what they say, 'Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy more lab supplies!'"