Author: Philip Fowler

Last week the MMM Unit held a plant sale to raise some money for Oxford Hospitals Charity. The work had started some weeks before with lots of propagation of spider plants and sourcing of paper coffee pots (so we didn’t have to buy any plastic pots).

The stall was staffed all day — by Katie Hopkins and Valentina Pennetta in the photo — and a grand total of £212 was raised. It’s the first year we’ve run an event like this and the team are already looking forward to next year!

Dot Nagy, one of our DPhil students, has written a great blog post about how she and others have got the rest of us in the Unit thinking more about how to reduce the environmental impact of our research.

We have to keep most of our biological samples at -80°C which is much colder than the -20°C you’ll find (hopefully) inside your freezer in the kitchen. This does require a lot of electricity.

Valentina put in an application to the Freezer Challenge and we came 19th out of 115 teams and won a Recognition Award! By increasing the temperature slightly on our freezers we estimate we will save 48kWh each day which is enough to boil an astonishing 436 litres of water.

And yes, that freezer is called Oprah…

This year, our group has achieved Silver in the Green Impact award – a sustainability scheme which supports teams who want to improve their sustainability efforts. As part of the scheme, you are given a toolkit with lots of different activities to complete which encourages people to think more about their environmental impact. Each task is assigned a point value, and you need to collect a specific number of points to achieve Bronze, Silver, Gold and Beyond Gold. Check out our other blog posts about our plant-based potluck, and recycling contaminated lab plastics to see some of the things we’ve been up to!

I really enjoyed completing the green impact award this year, some of the tasks really make you think outside of the box – like the biodiversity monitoring activities! I also appreciated that many of the activities are quite group oriented, giving us the added wellbeing benefit of team building as well as encouraging greener practices. 

There were plenty of tasks we couldn’t complete this year – we’ll definitely be taking part in 2026 and aiming for Gold!

Easily the biggest source of waste in our lab is single-use plastics – pipette tips, plastic loops, bottles, tubes… the list goes on. It’s estimated that the biosciences sector alone produces 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, which is roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of over one million UK citizens!

As advocates for the environment, it can be pretty demoralising to see just how much plastic you go through in your day-to-day lab work – it sometimes makes other efforts feel a bit pointless.

Because we work with biological samples, getting rid of contaminated plastics in an environmentally friendly way is no easy task, but our Lab Manager, Ali, was determined to find a solution. She came across a company called RecycleLab, which takes contaminated lab plastics and breaks them down to be turned into something new. The only thing we need to do first is to de contaminate them.

After some initial meetings, a visit to the RecycleLab site and some major updates to our SOPs, we now have a functioning lab plastic recycling system. So far, we’ve diverted 700 litres of our lab’s used plastics from the traditional non-recycling waste stream!

This is the third year that the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) held its Showcase at the popular Westgate Shopping Centre in the centre of Oxford. Like last year it was held jointly with the NIHR Oxford Health BRC.

Our research software engineers had redesigned and rewritten our dance mat game so now you took on the role of a doctor firing different coloured antibiotics at incoming bacteria. So far so easy: over time, however, the bacteria get resistant to one or more of the antibiotics (denoted by a coloured shape appearing on them) meaning a lot of foot stamping is required to keep changing to the right colour antibiotic!

The game starts nice and slowly but the difficulty increases rapidly. On the day a few people scored over a hundred but anything more than that was too challenging…

It was half-term which was great as it meant lots of parents, grandparents and children stopped by and talked to us about our research. By the end of day we’d spoken to 130 people; half of them had heard about the Showcase beforehand, three members of our PPIEP committee and some ex-members of MMM dropped in to say hi, the Deputy Head of Mabel Prichard School (whose school we visited earlier in the year) and finally we spoke to one person who was halfway through a 10km run!

In our efforts to encourage sustainable habits, the Green Team hosted our first-ever plant-based potluck lunch! The idea was simple: everyone brings along a plant-based dish, snack, or dessert (homemade or shop bought!) for people to try. It was a fun way to show just how varied and delicious a plant-based diet can be, and hopefully inspire a few new go-to recipes.

We had some very tasty contributions, like vegan sausage rolls, beetroot hummus, chocolate-covered strawberries, peanut butter filled dates, and loads more!

The feedback was really positive – people enjoyed the chance to catch up over food and try new things, and for our plant-based colleagues, it was especially nice to be able to join in without having to worry about the ingredients. We loved it so much, it’s now a monthly occurrence!