Human practices

The plastic lab

Research laboratories involved in mitigating the wasteful impacts of plastic pollution, including many other laboratories that conduct biochemical and chemical research appear to be producing large amounts of plastic waste themselves. In research laboratories, washable glass Petri dishes and culture tubes have been replaced with single-use plastic alternatives. Syringes and pipette tips are all used once and then discarded, while culture media is often sterilised through a disposable filter into a disposable pre-sterilised plastic bottle. Plastic consumables save time and labour: they come pre-sterilised and do not have to be washed at the end of the experiment. After use, most of them go into landfill or biohazard waste streams. While many lab plastics are recyclable in principle, Mick George, Cambridge University’s current waste contractor, does not allow them to be placed in the recycling bin – a rule which is likely due to valid concerns about contamination. In a 2015 Nature article, Mauricio Urbina and colleagues from the University of Exeter estimated that Exeter’s Department of Biosciences generated about 267 tonnes of plastic in 2014, which they extrapolated to an estimate of around 5.5 million tonnes of lab-generated plastic waste worldwide. While not an immense proportion of global plastic use (according to statistics from Plastics Europe, 322 million tonnes of plastic were produced worldwide in 2015), this is nonetheless a significant tonnage of waste, equivalent to the weight of about 2,619 London Eyes.

Aside from plastic disposables, another significant contributor to laboratory waste streams is packaging. Laboratory supplies often come bundled in absurd quantities of material, frequently including expanded polystyrene (EPS), which is used to insulate temperature-sensitive materials and is very hard to recycle.

We wanted to continue off the idea of laboratory plastic waste reduction as a sequel to last year’s iGEM goes green campaign by the TU_Dresden team.

Bywaters recycling company visit (The Plastic Lab)

Here we will write about the company Bywaters and what our company visit entailed. Bywaters facilities are equipped to deal with a variety of mixed recyclables from both the public and private sector, such as; mixed plastics (PET, HDPE), Aluminium, Plasterboard, Cardboard, tetrapak and paper. Other materials such as non-recyclable are sent to other EfW buildings, this is so that such materials are converted into renewable energy.

The company survey at Bywater consisted of two major questions for which we expected detailed answers for. The general purpose of this survey was to help give context and develop the idea of the Plastic Lab, which will help set a standard protocol for plastic use and reuse in labs for future iGEM teams to use. The first question was whether laboratory plastics are normally recycled and if any were recycled by Bywater themselves, to which an answer was provided by Shamim Miah, Client Relationship Manager in Bywaters. He said that although most laboratory plastics are made from commonly recycled materials, most plastics that come out of them, especially bio-experimental labs, cannot be recycled due to the potentially toxic contaminants that end up covering them from the experimental studies. Say for example micropipetting tips: unless isolated and specified by the customer, all micropipetting tips no matter if they were thrown in sterile from handling water or alcohol, we always must assume that they were used for handling hazardous chemicals and biomaterial. The company does not recycle laboratory plastic waste, but they do recycle a lot of our plastics into the medical and biomedical material and are one of the biggest recycling distributors in this area.

School conference

Our team took part in the 15th Anniversary Schools Science Conference where we had a stand informing approximately 420 secondary school students and their teachers about iGEM, and our project. Students were able to engage with the activities the team had prepared teaching them about the engineering of bacteria, synthetic biology and biobricks.

We did put out bins around the university to collect plastics and then use it in the lab to see how much polystyrene is used compared to other plastic.

Also, we planned for the school children to come and make some decorations from the plastic collected...