My lab went from 4000 kg to 130 kg of waste a year
nature.com
nature.com
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.
Source: what I remember my advisor telling me when I was a grad student
"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.
We did glass pipettes for everything and they were a royal pain to rinse until I rigged an automatic syphon made with a 2l measure and some plastic bits.
I went to work stoned and fell over carrying a week's glass back to the drying cab. I think I won the lab sweepstake for breakage value that day.
200 trips to the firth of forth seaside towns, one pair of gumboots, and a labcoat which was stolen the first week of uni in 1979. Coastal estuarine waterflow is fascinating.
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 . . .
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.
(2008) Bioactive Contaminants Leach from Disposable Laboratory Plasticware
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 always did it in a porcelain bowl, seems to work fine.
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.
...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...
I propose Great Dane dog as an alternative.
The better English equivalent to German Graf would have been an earl.
It's just not done. Maybe that's weird, or inconsistent, or whatever. But it is that way.
The megagram is on the same list as the dekaliter and the hectowatt. They don't exist :)
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.
Isn't that good practice and everything you can do?