Sustainable Laboratory Design and Safety: Making Smart Choices in Renovations and New Construction
Budgets and regulations are shifting fast. Learn how cross-functional teams apply EHS best practices, codes, and risk assessments to design safe, flexible labs in Harvard Chan School’s Guidelines for Laboratory Design.
Budgets and regulations are shifting fast—and in sustainable laboratory design, that pressure can push teams toward decisions that look efficient on paper but create bigger risks and costs later. When you’re planning renovations and new construction, the smartest outcomes come from early, cross-functional alignment among architects, engineers, lab managers, construction leaders, administrators, and Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) professionals.
Together, teams can apply EHS best practices, relevant codes and standards, and rigorous risk assessment to design safe, flexible labs that support today’s research while staying adaptable for future needs—without sacrificing long-term performance, compliance, or operating efficiency.
Why Cost Pressure Is Reshaping Lab Design
Right now, that alignment matters more than ever because the biggest force shaping laboratory design and renovation is cost, and cost is being increased from multiple directions.
“Almost all the pressures… terminate with the question of ‘cost,’” says Adrian Walters, Principal and Science Market Leader at SMMA in Cambridge, MA. Stricter requirements aimed at safer, more efficient buildings are arriving with a “blinding amount of complexity,” Walters adds, because rules and enforcement can vary dramatically across states, towns, and municipalities and countries. The result is real project risk: longer approvals, redesign churn, and budget creep.
At the same time, laboratories remain among the most energy-intensive building types. Sustainability goals are pushing teams toward higher-efficiency systems and lower-embodied-carbon materials, but Walters notes these choices can create “more fragile and complicated building systems” that demand more maintenance. Even when demand softens, labor and material costs may keep rising due to an aging trade workforce, tariff instability, and higher borrowing costs.
Under that pressure, the most dangerous “savings” are those that quietly erode laboratory safety and future capability. Walters sees teams repeatedly asked to justify EHS decisions, and he warns that programs can be misrepresented as lower risk to reduce safety accommodations. The temptation often shows up in high-cost, high-impact areas: laboratory ventilation, hazardous materials storage, exhaust design strategies, and essential safety equipment.
Consider a common example: pressure to treat fume hood exhaust as “non-hazardous,” sometimes framed as “I barely use chemicals today.” Walters’ point is simple: tomorrow’s science can change, and a hood that’s underspecified today becomes a compliance problem, an exposure risk, or an expensive retrofit later. Another example is pushing ductless fume hoods into organizations without the staffing, EHS governance, and facilities capacity to maintain them safely over time. In both cases, the short-term cost story ignores the operating reality. Similarly, Guidelines for Laboratory Design Program Director Lou DiBerardinis sees similar fault lines.
“Cutbacks in ventilation and storage space are early victims,” he says—decisions that can increase accidents and exposures and “damage research efforts and image and limit future activities.” When ventilation capacity is constrained or storage is undersized, behavior adapts: workarounds appear, congestion grows, and the lab’s ability to support research shrinks.
The Process Fix: Early, Cross-Functional Alignment
The best protection against these outcomes is not a single technical fix—it’s a better process. Michael Labosky, who teaches in the Guidelines for Laboratory Design program, notes that uncertainty around research funding and long project timelines can make organizations hesitate to invest. But when projects do move forward under constraints, decision pressure increases. Teams may be tempted to make “exaggerated favorable estimates” of needs rather than reduce scope transparently, and the familiar promise—“we’ll fix it later”—rarely materializes because new priorities always arrive. That’s why early collaboration is a cost-control strategy.
“Early collaboration is essential… and helps to set the best overall course from the start of a project,” Labosky explains. Walters puts it more bluntly: people hate backtracking, and late-arriving information forces redesign, delays, and expensive compromises. When architects, engineers, lab managers, EHS professionals, and administrators share assumptions early—hazards, workflows, equipment realities, maintenance capacity, and compliance expectations—teams can make faster, better tradeoffs with fewer surprises.
What A Future-Ready Lab Needs
What does a future-ready lab look like in this environment? Walters points to two core qualities: it must support the science safely, and it must be able to evolve. The first starts with risk assessment—understanding program hazards and SOP realities—then matching layouts, safety equipment, and infrastructure to what will happen in the space. It also includes designing for clear movement and efficient work patterns, so people aren’t pushed into unsafe improvisation.
The second quality—evolvability—is where resilience meets lifecycle cost. Flexibility isn’t only movable benches; it’s capacity and distribution strategies that allow change without major demolition. Adequate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing capability, thoughtful pressurization and exhaust planning, adaptable casework and utility drops, and structural readiness for equipment changes all help a lab accommodate new research needs. In a volatile funding climate, flexibility protects organizations from paying “new-lab prices” every time science shifts.
Just as important: the project isn’t finished when construction ends. A recurring failure point is the handoff from design and construction teams to operations—especially when staffing changes cause system knowledge to disappear. In today’s complex labs, commissioning and operational readiness are not paperwork; they’re risk reduction. Commissioning helps verify that critical safety and performance elements work as intended, supports compliance, and equips facilities and EHS teams to maintain systems safely. Skipping or shrinking commissioning can look like savings, but it often increases failures, downtime, and costly corrections after occupancy.
How Training Helps Teams Defend Smart Decisions
This is where training pays off—especially under budget pressure. Walters says the Guidelines for Laboratory Design program “fills in the knowledge gaps” that lead to dangerous and expensive mistakes, helping teams distinguish what can be trimmed without consequence and what is truly non-negotiable. Labosky adds that participants gain the knowledge and reasoning to explain to owners and leadership why certain decisions—tied to codes and standards, core EHS expectations, and long-term flexibility—cannot be deferred without real risk.
DiBerardinis emphasizes that the program is designed for the full stakeholder group: architects, engineers, EHS professionals, and lab personnel. Through workshops and lab experiences, participants practice aligning roles, constraints, and goals to deliver laboratories that support occupants’ work efficiently and effectively while remaining safe, compliant, and cost-conscious.
In uncertain times, organizations may be tempted to treat this kind of training as optional. But the risk of under-informed decisions is highest when financial pressure is greatest. Incidents, exposures, compliance failures, shutdowns, and retrofits can erase short-term savings and damage research momentum and reputation. When risk is invisible, good decisions can be hard to justify. Shared frameworks, shared language, and cross-functional understanding make them easier—and that’s exactly what organizations need to build labs that work now, last longer, and adapt.
