The nasty part of reducing waste in labs is that it depends a lot on the type of material that you're handling, so the know-how of one lab won't necessarily help another.
Just for the sake of example. The lab in the article is handling biological material, and the toxins being quantified are likely organic, at worst heavy metals in rather diluted concentrations. In those situations, compostable containers are a viable solution, and the glassware can be easily cleaned.
The same approach would not work for a lab handling organochlorines, where composting anything would be insane - you're causing less harm to the environment by incinerating the contaminated material and forcing the gases through a water column. And if you're handling large concentrations of heavy metals, cleaning will be way more involved than using liberal amounts of piranha solution.
The absolute majority of biology labs do things that don’t need disposable material. It used to be many used radioactive reagents but their use has decreased significantly as well. My lab used to use glass pipettes well into the 2010s because they were the miserliest PIs ever among other things. They only allowed everyone to use disposable pipettes when they became cheap enough or cheaper than the extra lab tech it needed to keep the pipettes flowing.
Most labs can totally very easily cut down on 80% of their waste output with a tiny bit of extra grease and some process change.
Heck if you really want to, you can go further - even consumables no one in western labs would think to reuse, like tissue culture flasks and pipette tips, were reused in my lab in india because they were poor. Discard tips that didn’t touch any bad reagent into a separate box for washing and ruse them for non critical steps, not that hard. Tissue culture flasks can’t be washed but you can reuse them multiple times without significant issues. For most cell line cultures this should have no effect on the result.
> How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles?
"They", who? Marine Institute? Probably zero, due to the nature of their samples (biological material) and scale (~8 samples/day). I wouldn't be surprised if they just leave the flasks overnight in a sodium hypochlorite solution.
The same however might not apply to a laboratory handling another type of sample, where cleaning the glassware might involve multiple solutions, or might require that the glassware "soaks" in the cleaning solution for a large amount of time, or handling a larger amount of daily samples. And it isn't just a matter of the required workforce to clean those flasks, but also additional space being used, or actually increasing waste and electricity usage through the cleaning process. That's my point anyway - those results from the Marine Institute don't generalise so well.
>How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles?
Good to get your message, it makes sense.
OTOH in the nicely appointed laboratory where the glassware cabinets are well stocked with spares, and hopefully breakage is low, by comparison there is virtually no burden from consumables as they move from trucks, to warehouses. Then delivery people streaming into the lab, days or weeks of supplies oveflowing from limited storage cabinets, and with waste removal operators following in turn.
IME there is much less of a use for disposables when the task does not need to be biologically sterile or when the cost can not be passed on to somebody like an insurance company.
In testing and research, but I'm industrial not clinical.
When I run it as a business, my clients deserve the best.
Sometimes cleaning glassware in advance and after a particular test or experiment, before returning the glassware to the shelf, needs to be routine.
Still that's only a handful of additional steps in what often amounts to a 1000-step process when you count every little thing.
And for that you've got to have chemists who take pride in every step, it's really no problem when they're already on staff.
>We observed the biggest cost savings from reducing operating times of fume hoods and cutting our use of organic solvents in the lab.
Energy is always so costly and exhaust blowers really compromise the climate control effectiveness. We have enough toxics that we depend on the constant flow of fresh air coming in to the whole lab as the hoods must stay on 24/7 with the sash at the calibrated height marked by the safety operator according to OSHA requirements.
So I've spent a lot of time over the years cutting waste in other ways since we're stuck wasting a significant amount of air-conditioning around-the-clock.
Glass also leaches silica, sodium and other materials into experiments (particularly at high pH), it just depends what contaminants are most concerning for your specific work.
I use a glass bowl for whipping egg whites, because you can't do that in plastic. The microscopic traces of oil that remain in the plastic stop it foaming.
Apparently the best thing to use is a copper bowl that you keep just for that, but I don't make enough things with egg whites to be worth it. It seems that the copper ions coming off the bowl make the egg proteins stick like crazy.
I use a metal bowl. If you really want to remove the oils, wash with vinegar before use - I don't usually bother, but did when whipping egg whites for a wedding cake.
IIRC, copper stabilizes the egg whites so they stay foamy for a decent time, but they don't always get as stiff as they do in a glass or metal bowl and it is definitely harder to overbeat. To be fair, if you are whipping by hand, you probably are in no danger of this. And for those that don't know, folks usually use something like cream of tartar in eggs to do a similar stabilizing, though you still get stiff foam.
Soap can also leach into your reagents. We used to maintain separate bottles labeled no soap to make media because it affected transformation frequency. Still, I’m on team reuse.
Having known someone who worked as a 'green' coordinator for a biomedical research facility: they were trying to do something about fume hoods (which evacuate massive amounts of heated/cooled/humidified/dehumidified indoor air) and dozens of old -80 freezers that consume several kilowatts each, run almost continuously, and should be replaced with more modern/efficient units, audited for what actually needs to be kept in that freezer (scientists are like packrats with samples), and so on...
...while getting continuously pestered by administrative staff because someone doesn't have a recycling bin and as far as the staffer is concerned, they might as well be clubbing baby seals every day they have to put a couple of pieces of copier paper in the regular trash bin.
> WashU operates over 900 ULT freezers across all campuses. These use approximately 10,500,000 kilowatt-hours of energy each year, resulting in an estimated ~8,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions from 1,850 cars.
You read that right: 10.5 GWhr per year used by sample storage freezers at one university. About 1.2MW continuous...
Don’t know if by high efficiency they also mean flat bed instead of standing freezers. Especially in -80 you can tell easily how big a difference that makes. The moment you open a standing -80 you can see the frozen air fall out and down. It then runs for hours to cool back down. We had a flat bed and that bigger won’t even switch on unless you keep it open for minutes straight.
The problem there is that the most obvious solution (4 tonnes) is a non-SI unit (but admittedly widely accepted), while the true SI solution (4 Mg) is even more confusing.
I find these numbers incredible. Just pipetting a thousand samples to prep for an instrument run requires thousands of disposable tips, filters etc depending on your protocol. The disposables have two advantages: you need to use a new one for each sample to prevent cross contamination and speed.
If they can pull this off, it’s great. The amount of waste generated is pretty incredible. But I’ve used a lot of, say, Kimble jars with plastic caps — can you really wash a few hundred of those tiny things in one go?
Tangentially, for home DIY projects. I'm often confused about what to do with half-used chemical products that I probably shouldn't pour down the drain or water the garden with. Things like termite coating or anti fungal finishes for timber.
Some builders I've spoken with tell me to pour it back into the container they came in, assume you still have left overs, because they can be re-used.
In the UK and Europe at large I expect, we're told to take them to the local recycling centre (the euphemism for the rubbish dump). They keep them separate and I guess incinerate them under more controlled conditions.
For half-used products you can also ask in your local makerspace if they want to use them? Depending on the application and the shelf-life someone else might have a use for it.
Most waste servicers will have specific hazmat procedures for things like ~~RoundUp~~ (they have dilution instructions), undried paint, or mineral spirits. You are typically not supposed to poor these down drains or dispose of them with landfill trash.
The medical industry also should spend some effort thinking about reducing waste. My company produces medical devices and the amount of trash produced during a surgery is just mind boggling. I know there are sterilization requirements but I am pretty sure you could reduce trash significantly with just a little thought about trash reduction and reuse.
I knew somebody who was working in the "sterilization department" of a large hospital. I think he was "cleaning" and re-sterilizing things like clamps and tweezers and whatnot.
Isn't that good practice and everything you can do?
Readit News
Just for the sake of example. The lab in the article is handling biological material, and the toxins being quantified are likely organic, at worst heavy metals in rather diluted concentrations. In those situations, compostable containers are a viable solution, and the glassware can be easily cleaned.
The same approach would not work for a lab handling organochlorines, where composting anything would be insane - you're causing less harm to the environment by incinerating the contaminated material and forcing the gases through a water column. And if you're handling large concentrations of heavy metals, cleaning will be way more involved than using liberal amounts of piranha solution.
Most labs can totally very easily cut down on 80% of their waste output with a tiny bit of extra grease and some process change.
Heck if you really want to, you can go further - even consumables no one in western labs would think to reuse, like tissue culture flasks and pipette tips, were reused in my lab in india because they were poor. Discard tips that didn’t touch any bad reagent into a separate box for washing and ruse them for non critical steps, not that hard. Tissue culture flasks can’t be washed but you can reuse them multiple times without significant issues. For most cell line cultures this should have no effect on the result.
"They", who? Marine Institute? Probably zero, due to the nature of their samples (biological material) and scale (~8 samples/day). I wouldn't be surprised if they just leave the flasks overnight in a sodium hypochlorite solution.
The same however might not apply to a laboratory handling another type of sample, where cleaning the glassware might involve multiple solutions, or might require that the glassware "soaks" in the cleaning solution for a large amount of time, or handling a larger amount of daily samples. And it isn't just a matter of the required workforce to clean those flasks, but also additional space being used, or actually increasing waste and electricity usage through the cleaning process. That's my point anyway - those results from the Marine Institute don't generalise so well.
Good to get your message, it makes sense.
OTOH in the nicely appointed laboratory where the glassware cabinets are well stocked with spares, and hopefully breakage is low, by comparison there is virtually no burden from consumables as they move from trucks, to warehouses. Then delivery people streaming into the lab, days or weeks of supplies oveflowing from limited storage cabinets, and with waste removal operators following in turn.
IME there is much less of a use for disposables when the task does not need to be biologically sterile or when the cost can not be passed on to somebody like an insurance company.
In testing and research, but I'm industrial not clinical.
When I run it as a business, my clients deserve the best.
Sometimes cleaning glassware in advance and after a particular test or experiment, before returning the glassware to the shelf, needs to be routine.
Still that's only a handful of additional steps in what often amounts to a 1000-step process when you count every little thing.
And for that you've got to have chemists who take pride in every step, it's really no problem when they're already on staff.
>We observed the biggest cost savings from reducing operating times of fume hoods and cutting our use of organic solvents in the lab.
Energy is always so costly and exhaust blowers really compromise the climate control effectiveness. We have enough toxics that we depend on the constant flow of fresh air coming in to the whole lab as the hoods must stay on 24/7 with the sash at the calibrated height marked by the safety operator according to OSHA requirements.
So I've spent a lot of time over the years cutting waste in other ways since we're stuck wasting a significant amount of air-conditioning around-the-clock.
Don't get me started on organic solvents . . .
(2008) Bioactive Contaminants Leach from Disposable Laboratory Plasticware
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1162395
Apparently the best thing to use is a copper bowl that you keep just for that, but I don't make enough things with egg whites to be worth it. It seems that the copper ions coming off the bowl make the egg proteins stick like crazy.
IIRC, copper stabilizes the egg whites so they stay foamy for a decent time, but they don't always get as stiff as they do in a glass or metal bowl and it is definitely harder to overbeat. To be fair, if you are whipping by hand, you probably are in no danger of this. And for those that don't know, folks usually use something like cream of tartar in eggs to do a similar stabilizing, though you still get stiff foam.
I always did it in a porcelain bowl, seems to work fine.
...while getting continuously pestered by administrative staff because someone doesn't have a recycling bin and as far as the staffer is concerned, they might as well be clubbing baby seals every day they have to put a couple of pieces of copier paper in the regular trash bin.
From another org's website: https://sustainability.wustl.edu/greenlabs/ultra-low-tempera...
> WashU operates over 900 ULT freezers across all campuses. These use approximately 10,500,000 kilowatt-hours of energy each year, resulting in an estimated ~8,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions from 1,850 cars.
You read that right: 10.5 GWhr per year used by sample storage freezers at one university. About 1.2MW continuous...
If they can pull this off, it’s great. The amount of waste generated is pretty incredible. But I’ve used a lot of, say, Kimble jars with plastic caps — can you really wash a few hundred of those tiny things in one go?
Some builders I've spoken with tell me to pour it back into the container they came in, assume you still have left overs, because they can be re-used.
https://www.wm.com/us/en/home/common-hazardous-waste
Isn't that good practice and everything you can do?