Our Green Impact Lab Accreditation success!
Posted on Thursday 20 November 2025
We're celebrating the success of the first round of our Green Impact Lab Accreditation (GILA), which is part of the University's Green Impact scheme.
Working throughout the summer and into the autumn, 31 teams from wet labs across Biology, Chemistry, School of Physics Engineering and Technology, Geography and Environment gathered evidence to complete up to 54 lab relevant actions from the nationally standardised list.
The teams who successfully reached the end of the programme, achieving over 175 points, were audited in October by trained York student auditors, in conjunction with SOS UK who run the Green Impact programme nationally. These 31 successful teams can now use the accreditation to demonstrate progress towards embedding sustainability in their research.
This is a significant milestone for the research community here at York.
Sarah Thompson, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, said:
"Congratulations to our research and laboratory community at York on the first successful completion cycle for Green Impact Labs Accreditation (GILA). The speed and determination of teams to achieve this has been impressive, and thank you to all who have given their time to ensure this outstanding result. This accreditation will grant eligibility for key funding through Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK (CRUK), supporting our sustainability efforts and continued excellence in research across our community."
GILA is focused on sustainability within wet research laboratories. GILA was launched nationally in January 2025 in response to the growing expectations from grant-making organisations that research groups are compliant with environmental sustainability policies. It's a nationally standardised certification that is easily recognised by research grant managers and other stakeholders, and demonstrates that the group taking part has achieved the expected level of environmental compliance.
Each team has now received a nationally standardised GILA certificate which demonstrates their commitment towards sustainability in research. Two further teams have also demonstrated efforts in working towards their accreditation and will continue throughout 2025/26 to achieve their accreditation.
Each year, teams will need to review documents and procedures to ensure they are kept up to date or improved. This means that sustainability is kept on the agenda and it isn't considered a tick-box exercise.
Going forward: 2025/26
The new dedicated GILA Toolkit for 2025/26 is now online for existing and new wet lab teams to join. We invite everyone to join an introductory webinar on Wednesday 26 November at midday to explain how this year’s programme will work.