Congratulations to the team at the NSW Health Statewide Biobank, who won the Government Sector Biorepository Award in the 2025 International Freezer Challenge, a competition promoting sustainable cold storage across sectors worldwide.

Senior Research Sci­en­tist at the NSW Statewide Biobank Dr Beth Caru­a­na said the chal­lenge is a great way to get labs think­ing about how sim­ple actions can scale to mas­sive envi­ron­men­tal savings.

“The award recog­nis­es ener­gy-effi­cient cold-stor­age prac­tices, doc­u­ment­ed process improve­ments and mea­sur­able reduc­tions in pow­er use and heat load across the biobank’s freez­ers,” Beth said.

“This award means a lot to the team, espe­cial­ly as Biobanks can use a lot of ener­gy in day-to-day operations.

“A biobank is a stor­age facil­i­ty, or safe house, for tis­sue sam­ples, tumour cells, DNA and blood sam­ples used for research into dis­eases,” she said.

The NSW Health Statewide Biobank hous­es state-of-the-art, tem­per­a­ture-con­trolled stor­age sys­tems, includ­ing a robot­ic freez­er that can hold up to three mil­lion specimens.

“This tech­nol­o­gy pro­tects the long-term integri­ty of sam­ples, vital for stud­ies last­ing over a decade, but also con­sumes a large amount of ener­gy,” Beth said.

This was the first year the NSW Health Statewide Biobank par­tic­i­pat­ed in the competition.

The team doc­u­ment­ed sus­tain­abil­i­ty mea­sures through­out the year, including:

• Week­ly, month­ly and annu­al freez­er maintenance
• High-den­si­ty trays in the robot­ic freez­er to max­imise capacity
• Reg­u­lar freez­er clean-outs to dis­card unused reagents
• Replace­ment of mal­func­tion­ing freez­ers with ener­gy-effi­cient units.

“These prac­tices con­tin­ue to reduce ener­gy con­sump­tion and heat load, while safe­guard­ing the qual­i­ty of spec­i­mens for long-term research. Look­ing ahead, the biobank team aims to build on this foun­da­tion and achieve an even stronger result in next year’s chal­lenge,” Beth said.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to every­one involved in ensur­ing the ser­vice oper­ates sus­tain­ably and decreas­es its car­bon footprint!

To learn more about the NSW Health Statewide Biobank, vis­it; https://biobank.health.nsw.gov.au/

To par­tic­i­pate in the 2026 Freez­er Chal­lenge, vis­it: https://freezerchallenge.mygreenlab.org/

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