Recycling Lab Consumables and Reducing Lab Waste
Like many companies, we are more and more aware of the negative impact of single-use plastics. Plastic does not break down like other materials, but will last as microplastics that contaminate the environment, such as polluting food and water sources, and causing harm to marine and terrestrial organisms through bioaccumulation. Unfortunately, across all scientific disciplines, plastic is a perfect material for laboratory consumables as a result of its properties, which makes moving away from single-use plastics very difficult within this industry.
However, at Parsagen Diagnostics we have set up a dry plastic laboratory waste recycling initiative with a local supplier. This service collects up to 1000L of autoclaved laboratory consumables that are taken to be recycled into strong plastic boards used for construction, shopfitting, joinery and much more. Not only is this preventing large amounts of single-use plastic from going into landfill, a tree is also planted for every box of lab waste collected!