Tight economic realities in clinical and research operations have spurred the need to re-examine financial models that support the infrastructure of biobanking. Finding ways to streamline operations, trim costs, and become more conscious of the carbon footprint of biobank operations has made ‘‘sustainability’’ a well-used buzzword of our time. This motivated us to organize a special symposium on biobanking sustainability at the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories’ (ISBER) 2014 Annual Meeting & Exhibits in Orlando, Florida. The topic crosses all of the sectors that ISBER represents, thus, we invited speakers from clinical, research, environmental, private advocacy, and government biobanks. The speakers were asked to focus on financial sustainability, share their specific experiences, and engage the ISBER meeting participants in an interactive discussion on the topic that could also be shared as a special issue on biobanking sustainability in Biopreservation and Biobanking. The goal of the symposium was to identify financial sustainability challenges that biobankers are facing in general and in specific sectors, their current solutions, and unanswered questions that may still need to be addressed. In preparation for the ISBER symposium, we asked ourselves how we define sustainability in biobanking and the reasons why sustainability in biobanking is necessary. Although we focused on financial sustainability as a topic, it is not the only dimension. Two other dimensionsof sustainability exist: social and operational (includes environmental). Social sustainabilityfocusesonthe acceptabilityof the biobankand its activities at large by the major stakeholders (e.g., successful involvement of and collaboration with engagement of the patients and donors). Operational sustainability covers different aspects of efficiency such as whether the biobank is managed professionally, its environmental footprint, and also whether the biobank collects the biospecimens and data that the po