Sustainable Life Science facilities are grounded in long-term performance thinking: understanding client-specific processes, challenging assumptions and making every technical decision count.
Life Science organisations face growing pressure to reduce carbon emissions, resource consumption and embodied environmental impact. Yet laboratories and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities must maintain rigorous environmental conditions, regulatory compliance and operational resilience. Sustainable progress therefore depends on understanding where control is genuinely essential, and where performance can be achieved more intelligently.
Control requirements make life sciences facilities among the most resource-intensive buildings to operate. High ventilation rates, filtration, pressure regimes, temperature stability, process cooling, deep-freeze storage and redundancy all protect people, products and research, but they also drive significant energy use and embodied carbon.
The challenge is to decarbonise facilities without compromising the controlled environments on which research and production depend. In pharmaceutical manufacturing, any intervention must demonstrate that product quality, containment, operator safety and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) remain protected.
At Deerns, our recent projects show that sustainability and compliance do not have to be competing priorities. The focus is on identifying where controls are essential, challenging inherited assumptions and finding ways to deliver the required performance with less energy, fewer resources and less embodied impact.
Compliance creates the design boundary
The Livisto Animal Health upgrade in Rio Saliceto, Italy, illustrates the importance of working within operational constraints. Existing β-lactam areas are being reorganised to increase capacity, improve GMP compliance and HVAC segregation, and reduce operator exposure. Construction must proceed beside live manufacturing, involving several contractors and tightly controlled interfaces.
Retaining and upgrading an operational plant can avoid the environmental and financial cost of replacement. That benefit is credible only when access, safety zoning, phasing and responsibilities are carefully managed. Deerns’ coordinated safety planning enables the asset to be transformed while protecting production continuity.
At Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), the challenge is different, but the principle is the same. Its new cleanroom includes ISO Class 5, 6 and 7 spaces, HEPA filtration, stable pressure regimes and specialist process systems. Research may be affected by a single particle, minimal vibration or electromagnetic interference, so performance cannot be diluted simply to achieve an energy target.
Sustainable control, not reduced control
The cleanroom at TU/e demonstrates how sustainability can be engineered into highly controlled research environments. This all-electric building combines heat pumps and aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) with heat recovery from ventilation air. Intake, extract and recirculation airflows are being optimised to achieve the required conditions with the lowest practical air volume, while biobased materials are used where compatible.
A risk-based approach focuses on 4 key questions:
- Which conditions are genuinely required by the process?
- Where can zoning and recirculation reduce unnecessary treatment?
- Which energy streams can be recovered without creating contamination risks?
- How can systems remain flexible as research or production change?
These questions turn sustainability into an engineering decision and help prevent overdesign that can lock facilities into avoidable energy and operating costs.
Circularity and resilience beyond energy
At Utrecht University’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Deerns is applying circular principles to a new education and laboratory building targeting BREEAM Excellent. Potential reuse extends to sprinkler components, chillers, air-handling units, cable containment and lighting. Yet the building will also include a BSL-3 laboratory, where safety, hygiene, cleanability and reliability are critical.
Reuse cannot be assumed to be sustainable. Each component must be assessed for condition, remaining service life, compatibility, maintainability and its effect on compliance. Circularity becomes credible only when reused assets can perform reliably in their new context.
The genetic research facility for Wageningen University & Research adds another perspective. Its energy-neutral ambition and timber main structure must coexist with deep-freeze storage and the protection of irreplaceable genetic collections. Cooling and fire suppression are being designed around the vulnerability of the contents, recognising that lost samples or repeated research would carry environmental consequences beyond annual energy figures.
Sustainable laboratory design must therefore address 3 critical factors:
- operational energy and emissions;
- embodied carbon and responsible reuse of materials;
- resilience, continuity and the protection of scientific value.
From projects to lasting sustainable performance
Deerns’ multi-year framework agreement with Delft University of Technology shows why sustainability requires a long-term operating model. Across more than 60 buildings, changing research equipment, teaching methods and ageing installations create a continuous need for adaptation. A shared knowledge base allows decisions to become faster, more consistent and aligned with campus wide energy and circularity goals.
Regulation is not an obstacle to sustainable Life Sciences design; it defines the performance that responsible engineering must deliver. Progress comes from understanding processes early, challenging inherited assumptions, integrating disciplines and testing environmental gains against operational risk.
By combining Life Sciences process knowledge with cleanroom engineering, building services, safety, building physics and sustainability expertise, Deerns helps clients turn constraints into better performing facilities. The laboratories and pharmaceutical plants of the future will not be sustainable because they use fewer controls, but because every control is purposeful, efficient and designed for long term value.
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