Easily the biggest source of waste in our lab is single-use plastics – pipette tips, plastic loops, bottles, tubes… the list goes on. It’s estimated that the biosciences sector alone produces 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, which is roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of over one million UK citizens!
As advocates for the environment, it can be pretty demoralising to see just how much plastic you go through in your day-to-day lab work – it sometimes makes other efforts feel a bit pointless.
Because we work with biological samples, getting rid of contaminated plastics in an environmentally friendly way is no easy task, but our Lab Manager, Ali, was determined to find a solution. She came across a company called RecycleLab, which takes contaminated lab plastics and breaks them down to be turned into something new. The only thing we need to do first is to de contaminate them.
After some initial meetings, a visit to the RecycleLab site and some major updates to our SOPs, we now have a functioning lab plastic recycling system. So far, we’ve diverted 700 litres of our lab’s used plastics from the traditional non-recycling waste stream!
