Research and Academic Labs Resource Conservation
As a building type, the laboratory demands our attention:
what the cathedral was to the 14th century, the train station was to the 19th century, and the office building was to the 20th century, the laboratory is to the 21st century. That is, it is the building type that embodies, in both pro-gram and technology, the spirit and culture of our age and attracts some of the greatest intellectual and economic resources of our society.
Unfortunately, a laboratory is also a prodigious consumer of natural resources. For example, laboratories typically consume 5 to 10 times more energy per square foot than do office buildings. And some specialty laboratories, such as cleanrooms and labs with large process loads, can consume as much as 100 times the energy of a similarly sized institutional or commercial structure.
How you can help:
**Information provided by the EPA Labs for the 21st Century project**
