A look into the future: characteristics of the ultimate plastic product for the lab.

Goodbye single-use, hello multi-use!

If you work in a bioscience lab, you probably know that this type of research produces a massive amount of plastic waste. In a Nature article from 2015, researchers estimate that academic research labs produce 5.5 million tons of plastic waste each year. Yes, you got it right: 5.5 million tons!

That’s roughly 2% of the total plastic waste generated globally each year and more or less the combined weight of 67 cruise liners. And that’s not even including industrial research labs …

The world is clearly facing a huge plastic waste problem, and research labs are without a doubt contributing heavily to the problem. Fortunately, a growing number of researchers want to take green actions in the lab – and many are now sorting their plastic waste. Importantly, the plastic waste problem can, however, NOT be solved by sorting alone since most of the sorted, recyclable plastic isn’t actually recycled. Read that again!

So rather than focusing exclusively on what happens to the plastic AFTER we use it, we must zoom out and consider all parts of the plastic life cycle, including how it’s produced and how it’s used.

My name is Nikoline Borgermann, I work as a green lab consultant at Ava Sustain – and here’s my take on the top features of future plastic products for the lab.

Goodbye single-use, hello multi-use

While the use of disposable plastic items in the lab is convenient in terms of ensuring sterility and saving time from handling glassware, it’s also the main reason for the enormous amount of plastic waste coming out of bioscience labs. Single-use plastic may be needed for certain sterile activities in the lab – but the use of it is often habitual rather than strictly needed.

As lab users, we can do our part by reusing single-use items whenever possible. We can clean and reuse items such as conical tubes, cell scrapers and scalpels for non-sterile work, and we can use the same serological pipette for the same buffer throughout the day.

But we also need the manufacturers to do their part; we need more plastic products optimised for multiple use. Could the manufacturers give the single-use items a makeover to allow for multi-use? Can they make it withstand repeated use, rinsing, washing and autoclaving – with no negative impact on the quality?

In the ideal future, the manufacturers will not only have optimised their products for multi-use, they will also provide you with detailed information about how to properly clean, sterilise, and store the plastic products for long-term and repeated use. They will inform you how many times you can reuse the items without compromising the quality of the product – and the manufacturers are competing to reach the highest reuse numbers!

How low can you go?

Maybe you are able to switch from plastic to glass in all aspects of your lab work (if so: well done!) but if not, you can make a difference by purchasing plastic products with reduced plastic content. A series of lab products has already been optimised in terms of plastic reductions – including the TipOne pipette tips from Starlab – but there’s still a long way to go.

How little plastic can manufacturers put into a product – how thin can the walls of a pipette tip, a tube, a serological pipette or a cell culture dish be – without compromising the functions of the items? Reducing the amounts of plastic going into the products can drastically reduce plastic waste. Future plastic products will therefore be as thin and light as possible – and so will their packaging!

You know what they say about mixing different kinds of alcohol …

While I am still not convinced that the number of alcohol types is a better indicator for the severity of your hangovers than the total amount of alcohol consumed, the mixing of plastic types is without a doubt worsening the plastic waste hangovers of this planet.

As mentioned above, recycling alone is not the solution to the plastic waste problem – but it plays an important role.

If you are lucky, you can find a pictogram with a number on your plastic items. The pictogram sure does look like a recycling icon – but it’s not. The numbers go from 1-7 of which 1-6 are specific plastic types (PET, HDPE, PVC, LDPE, PP, PS) and 7 is ‘other’. Some of these plastic types are in principle recyclable, others are not, but none of them are easily recyclable. And unlike glass and aluminium, the quality of the plastic is reduced when recycled – so we can’t recycle plastic endlessly like our glass jars and beer cans.

Pure plastic (meaning: of one type only) can be melted and mixed with virgin plastic to form new plastic products of similar quality, but this is not the case for mixed plastic (pictogram no 7, ‘other’). You can’t isolate the individual plastic types once they are melted together, so when we mix different plastic types, we are eliminating the chance of recycling them. If anything, we can downcycle the plastic into products of substantially lower quality – which is ultimately just a step on the way to the residual waste bin.

Avoiding the mixing of plastic types is thus crucial in future plastic products – not just in the melting process, but also in the assembling process: the ideal future plastic products will have been designed so all the individual plastic parts consist of the same plastic type to avoid having to manually disassemble lids from containers or peel off labels and pieces of paper before throwing things into the recycling bin. (And in case you didn’t already know: at this point in time, the vast majority of our plastic waste is indeed disassembled and hand sorted by people (!) after it leaves your house or the lab)

What goes around comes around

Another key feature of the ideal future plastic product is that you can return it to the manufacturer after use. If it’s not contaminated and destined to be incinerated, manufacturers and/or suppliers will regularly pick up your used plastic products – or they will pay the shipping costs for returning them.

Such takeback programs not only work as a motivation for manufacturers to reduce the plastic content of their products, they also provide a fine opportunity for them to use this well-sorted pure plastic in new products. Manufacturers may even be able to directly reuse some items – pipette tip boxes and wafers are ideal candidates for such initiatives!

In the ideal future, takeback programs will exist not just for the plastic items that you deliberately ordered, but also the packaging and shipping material that came with it.

Remember the three R’s – and that they are not equally impactful

I have faith that in a not too distant future, we will produce drastically less plastic waste in the labs – but I am also convinced that we won’t get there simply by sorting. While RECYCLING is definitely part of the solution, the road to a planet that isn’t drowning in plastic waste is paved with the words REDUCE and REUSE – and lab users and manufacturers must embark on this journey hand in hand.