What do all of these items have in common? They go straight to the trash after a single use in most laboratories. Because we work with chemicals and need things to be very clean, we can’t re-use most lab supplies. But it’s hard to generate so much waste when we are actually working to support the environment!
Luckily for us, a few years ago we began partnering with Polycarbin to recycle pipette tips, gloves, and even reagent bottles and caps! Polycarbin started in 2020 and works mainly with universities, biotech companies, and healthcare companies to divert single-use lab consumables from the waste stream, recycle them, and make more lab items from the recycled plastic. According to Polycarbin, the scientific community generates over 12 billion pounds of plastic waste every year. It took a little convincing to get them to work with our small lab, but we’re so happy that they were open to the idea.
We now have three bins in our lab: pipette tips go into one, gloves into another, and reagent bottles and caps into the third. When the bins are full, we ship them off to Polycarbin, where they recycle the materials back into lab consumables! For example, they turn the pipette tips back into pipette tips and sell them on their website.
So far, recycling our lab plastics has diverted over 30 pounds of waste from the landfill, conserved 33,000 gallons of water, and saved 45 pounds of fossil fuels.
