AstraZeneca and Amgen are among the winners of a competition that demonstrates how gamification can motivate companies and employees to tackle sustainability challenges.
The two pharma giants were among more than 4,000 laboratories and close to 270 organizations that saved a total of almost 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy by changing the way they operate and maintain freezers that store biological samples.
Labs cut energy by setting freezers at slightly higher temperatures — minus 70 degrees Celsius rather than the industry standard of minus 80 degrees, a change that has no impact on most samples — and ensuring that freezer components are properly maintained.
These steps can have meaningful impacts because lab freezers are “pretty significant energy hogs,” said James Connelly, CEO of My Green Lab, which runs the 2026 Freezer Challenge and other initiatives designed to make laboratories more sustainable. A single ultra-low temperature freezer can use as much energy as two American homes, he estimated. (Raising the temperature of food storage freezers can also produce useful savings.)
Amgen won the Top Organization Award by saving an average of 5,314 kWh per day during the first half of 2026, with U.K.-based AstraZeneca notching up daily savings of 5,244 kWh, earning it the Winning Streak Award for repeated high performance in the challenge, which launched in 2017. Siemens Healthineers, which operates in Canada, Ireland and the U.S., was named Top Organization in the hospital category, and the U.K.’s Institute of Cancer Research scooped the academic section.
Gamification hack
Gamifying the energy savings is “one of the hacks we use to drive impact,” said Connelly. “So much of sustainability these days is doom and gloom and compliance,” he noted. Adding the awards and recognition pushes teams to do something that is already in their interest — saving energy and, thus, money — but which they might not otherwise act on.
Sustainability professionals often say that company rankings can motivate C-suites and boards to fund projects, even if the competitions offer kudos rather than cash to winners. Influential competitions elsewhere in sustainability include CDP’s Corporate A List, which recognizes companies that score highly for environmental transparency; the EPA’s Green Power Partnership National Top 100, which ranks companies by clean power purchases (its status under the current U.S. administration is unclear); and the Global 100 list from media and research organization Corporate Knights.
