Plastic in labs: the ultimate plastic product for the lab, revisited
Goodbye single-use, hello multi-use.
Academic research labs are estimated to produce around 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, roughly 2% of all plastic waste generated globally, and that figure doesn't even include industrial research labs. A growing number of researchers now sort their plastic waste in response, which matters, but sorting alone cannot solve the problem: most sorted, recyclable plastic still isn't actually recycled, largely because there's no reliable demand for the reprocessed material at the other end. Solving this means looking at the whole plastic life cycle, not just what happens after use.
Reuse before recycle
Single-use plastic is sometimes genuinely required for sterile work, but its use in the lab is often habitual rather than strictly necessary. Conical tubes, cell scrapers and scalpels can often be cleaned and reused for non-sterile work, and the same serological pipette can often serve the same buffer throughout a working day. But lab users can only do so much on their own; manufacturers need to design more products for multiple use in the first place, built to withstand repeated rinsing, washing and autoclaving without any drop in quality, and to tell users clearly how many times a product can be reused before quality is compromised.
How little plastic can a product actually need
Where switching from plastic to glass isn't practical, reduced-plastic-content products make a real difference. How thin can the walls of a pipette tip, a tube, a serological pipette or a cell culture dish be made without compromising function? Starlab's TipOne® system is one example of a product already optimised along these lines, and the packaging around products deserves the same scrutiny as the products themselves.
Why mixing plastic types quietly ruins recyclability
Pure, single-type plastic can be melted down and mixed with virgin plastic to form new products of similar quality. Mixed plastic, marked with the "7, other" recycling code, cannot: once different plastic types are melted together, they can't be separated back out, so mixing them effectively removes the possibility of recycling and leaves downcycling into lower-quality products as the best remaining option. This matters for how products are assembled, not just how they're manufactured. A lid and container made from two different plastics, or a label that has to be manually peeled off before recycling, both work against recyclability, and much of today's plastic sorting is still done by hand once it leaves a lab or a home. TipOne®'s system is built entirely from polypropylene precisely to avoid this problem.
Genuine takeback changes the economics
A product designed for the ideal future is one you can return to the manufacturer after use, uncontaminated and not destined for incineration, with the manufacturer or supplier arranging collection or covering the shipping. Takeback programmes don't just motivate manufacturers to keep reducing plastic content; they create a reliable source of well-sorted, pure plastic that can go straight back into new products, which is exactly the missing piece that makes sorting worthwhile in the first place. Since early 2025, TipOne® racks manufactured in Germany have used recycled TipOne® plastic collected directly through the programme, closing that loop in practice rather than in theory.
Reduce and reuse do more than recycle ever will
Recycling is part of the solution, but it was never going to be the whole answer. The most effective route to a lab that isn't drowning in plastic waste runs through using less material in the first place and reusing what's already there, with lab users and manufacturers working on both fronts together.
