Environmental Impact Assessment of Biobanking Strategies: Creating a Sustainable Biobanking Roadmap for sample storage

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The UK has made a commitment to achieve net-zero by 2050. To achieve this, the UK must develop environmentally sustainable health research strategies immediately. Biobanks have expanded dramatically over the past few decades and large-scale biobanks are now a mainstay in the UK, including UK Biobank and the forthcoming Our Futures Health. While biobanks support a wide range of health researchers, they are also associated with unintended environmental impacts, including natural resource extraction and consumption, carbon emissions, waste, the production of hazardous chemicals, and impacts on biodiversity. This project focuses on their impacts associated with carbon emissions in line with the NHS's promise to reach net-zero by 2050. A primary source of a biobank's emissions comes from the storage of biological samples at ultra-low temperatures (ULTs). This project aims to assess the carbon emissions associated with two ULT storage options for biobanks: ULT freezers and liquid nitrogen (LN2). Using a case study approach of three biobanking sites, this project will assess both the direct carbon emissions associated with each storage option, as well as the embodied carbon emissions from their production, manufacturing and transport. It will also consider how different storage configurations affect these assessments, including decentralised versus centralised ULT freezer storage, and generating LN2 on-site versus having it delivered. Finally, it will assess the accompanying financial costs for each storage approach and configuration. These assessments will be drawn together in two stakeholder workshops that will explore the perceived drivers and barriers associated with each storage strategy (financial, social, political etc), including what pressures exist for individual researchers to choose a particular option as opposed to another. As much as possible and to refrain from being carbon-centric, they will also discuss the inter-relationship between carbon emissions and other environmental impacts, and any trade-offs between them. These workshops will also be used to co-design guidelines on how institutions and funders can best support researchers to attain the most environmentally sustainable biobanking practices.