3Rs Centre Utrecht receives Incubator Grant Pathways to Sustainability

The 3Rs Centre Utrecht is delighted to announce that its project ‘SUSTAINIMAL – aligning sustainability and animal welfare’ has been funded as a new incubator initiative by Utrecht University’s strategic theme Pathways to Sustainability.

SUSTAINIMAL aims to address an important yet often overlooked sustainability challenge: the continued reliance on animal-derived products (ADP) in everyday laboratory workflows. The initiative connects animal-free research and sustainable laboratory practices, thereby connecting two fields that are often treated separately.

Due to systemic challenges like established protocols, lack of comparable sustainability data, and limited institutional incentives to change, more sustainable and animal-free alternatives have not yet been adopted at scale. To explore how this system can be shifted, SUSTAINIMAL will bring together animal welfare expertise, sustainability assessment, laboratory practice, behavioural-change knowledge, NGOs (like Stichting Proefdiervrij), biotech companies and policy-oriented stakeholders. The initiative aims to develop a shared theory of change for reducing ADP use, and to co-create strategies that enable researchers to test, validate and adopt ADP-free protocols.

The Incubator Grant is an instrument to invest in community building, understanding for each other’s perspectives, and further develop the consortium and the project idea. If you are interested in knowing more or becoming part of the team please do not hesitate to Jeffrey Bajramovic: j.j.bajramovic@uu.nl.