5.5 Million Tons of Lab Plastic: Can Robot Washers and Steel Dishes Help?

Six years ago, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, most research laboratories scaled back their operations. But supply chain bottlenecks left scientists struggling to obtain essential lab consumables, making it difficult to maintain even essential research activities.

“We were forced to think about creative ways to reuse tips or conserve plastics in the lab,” recalled Clay Wright, a synthetic biologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, who develops systems to improve sustainability. “Even outside of the necessity that COVID and supply chain issues [caused], there’s a decent amount of plastic waste that’s generated in molecular and cell biology research,” he said. “It would be great if we can reduce this.”

Indeed, biology, medical, and agricultural laboratory research produces an estimated 5.5 million tons of single-use plastic waste annually, equivalent to the waste generated by roughly 67 cruise liners, and accounting for 83 percent of the plastic recycled worldwide in 2012.¹

“Compared to an office space…the research that you do is enormously resource-intense, and that has a huge impact on the environment,” said Pernilla Sörme, technical program director at My Green Lab, a non-profit organization that aims to build a global culture of sustainability in science. As someone who guides stakeholders on how to implement more sustainable practices in biomedical labs, Sörme sees that change is underway.

For a long time, scientists and others considered the environmental cost of laboratory research as an unavoidable price for scientific progress. But increasingly, sustainability experts, entrepreneurs, and scientists are challenging this assumption by approaching the problem from different angles. Using the foundational principles of sustainability to reduce, reuse, or recycle single-use plastics, various stakeholders are innovating ways to shrink labs’ environmental footprint without affecting the quality of research.

An Automated Washing Protocol Helps Scientists Reuse Lab Plastics

Researchers have found that reusing plastic consumables in a microbiology lab saves thousands of dollars and hundreds of kilograms of plastic each year and reduces the lab’s carbon footprint.^2,3 This insight motivated Wright and his team to optimize a way to clean and reuse pipette tips and other plastic lab materials.

However, they first needed to test the feasibility of their decontamination protocols. “How do we clean [pipette tips] with the rigor that was necessary to prevent detectable contamination in our protocols over time?” said Wright.

Digging into previous reports detailing biohazard decontamination methods led the researchers to bleach, baking soda, and detergent. Using assays to detect DNA, yeast, and bacterial cells, the researchers optimized different protocols—including wash times—for these materials. This system evolved into TidyTron, a library of automated wash-and-reuse protocols optimized for a liquid-handling robot to clean used laboratory plastics.⁴

“We…spent a lot of time developing different protocols with different kinds of rigors of washing and then washing the cleaning reagents as well in order to prevent both contamination of the previous reagents as well as contamination of the cleaning reagents,” explained Wright.

To test whether these protocols would indeed contribute to a greener future, the researchers used mathematical modeling to estimate the predicted reduction in micropipette tip usage. They found that TidyTron could reduce the consumption of tips by millions over a seven-year period.

When they launched the platform, Wright heard from scientists in Germany and Africa, “indicating that other people were making use of it,” he said. While he admitted that only a few of his lab members currently utilize it, others do their share by using autoclavable multi-well plates and reusing plastics whenever they can. “We all need to make an effort, especially as scientists ourselves, [and ask], ‘How can we advance society while reducing the environmental burden of our advancement?’” said Wright.

However, Sörme does not believe that the burden of improving sustainability in labs should lie on scientists alone. “Usually, people are busy curing cancer and things. They don't have time to go and look at [their environmental footprint],” she said. She believes that My Green Lab, which guides scientists on sustainable practices and offers certifications by estimating the impact of lab practices, can help in this regard.

Transforming Biohazard Waste into Recycled Polymers for Reuse

Malcolm Bell, a microbiologist who is also a board director at My Green Lab, agreed that scientists or healthcare companies alone should not have to offer greener alternatives. Having worked in the life sciences and healthcare industries for decades, Bell has not only witnessed advances in science but also seen a spike in the use of single-use plastics associated with these advances. “I suppose I've also witnessed the fact that there's been no advances in how these waste streams are treated,” he said, explaining that autoclaving and incineration—both energy-intensive methods—remain the most commonly used ways to decontaminate lab plastic waste before it ends up in landfills. “There are many ways to inactivate bacteria and viruses in general, and the fact that heat is the only one that's used became a very large source of frustration for me,” said Bell.

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This motivated him to found Envetec Sustainable Technologies with the goal of developing a non-thermal method to treat plastic waste generated in the lab. He envisioned that this process would not damage the plastic polymers, making the disinfected material suitable for recycling and enable it to be shaped into other lab equipment. “If these polymers that have been incinerated and landfilled go into another medical device that may not come in contact with the patient [or] the drug, that's a pretty damn good outcome,” said Bell.

In order to provide that shift, the team at Envetec Sustainable Technologies developed a system called GENERATIONS, which shreds biohazard waste, disinfects it with a biodegradable chemical, and converts the plastic waste into a recycled polymer. According to Bell, this method achieved a high efficiency in disinfecting biological material, including bacterial spores, which are the hardest to kill. He added that the technology had reduced carbon emissions than traditional waste management methods.

A few months ago, the company partnered with Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) to test the feasibility of this pipeline. Labs using billions of disposable plastic Petri dishes in 2024 motivated teams at Envetec and BD to look for a way to recycle the waste. In a proof-of-principle experiment, the team at Envetec used their technology to recycle unused plastic Petri dishes and turned it into feedstock that BD then molded into new Petri dishes. These new plates met key quality criteria, demonstrating the feasibility of this pipeline.

In addition to Petri dishes, Bell said that the company has also worked on recycling and forming pellets from other lab consumables like blood collection tubes, quantitative real-time PCR containers, pipette tips, and Pasteur pipettes.

Reducing Plastic Waste by Redesigning Lab Consumables

While Envetec Sustainable Technologies’ solution helps recycle plastic waste into reusable material, other researchers are creating new tools to replace single-use plastics. As a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, K Venkatesan Iyer noticed that cell biology and imaging experiments in particular generated a lot of plastic waste. In 2022, Iyer launched a company called GreenFocus Research Technologies to offer sustainable solutions for research laboratories’ imaging requirements.

His first goal was to replace the single-use glass-bottom plastic Petri dishes used for microscopy with an eco-friendly alternative. He had to be cognizant of a number of factors when he started designing the dish. He explored aluminum as an alternative to plastic, but “then I figured that aluminum is actually toxic for cells.” So, he turned toward a type of stainless steel that medical implants are made out of.

Over the next few years, he perfected the design and manufactured the dishes and sold them to several institutes across India. Their final product is GreenDish. Scientists can culture cells in the dish, and “the whole chamber can be cleaned, autoclaved and used again,” said Iyer. The reusability of the dishes means they work out more economically than single-use dishes for consumers. In fact, researchers have successfully subjected cells cultured in the GreenDish to live cell imaging as well as super-resolution microscopy.

He hopes to expand the company’s scope to replace other imaging equipment eventually, in part because he realized that scientists were more willing to explore a new alternative for end-point experiments like microscopy. But Iyer faced some resistance toward change even for these end-point experiments initially. While he had to demonstrate the reliability of his product in the beginning, “once somebody tested it…we [saw] that they actually spread this word to other researchers,” said Iyer.

Increased Awareness Paves the Way for a Sustainable Future of Lab Practices

One of the reasons Iyer believes GreenDish has received good feedback is that scientists have become more aware of sustainability issues in science. “What I have observed over the last few years is that many labs actually have started to think about how to make things sustainable,” said Iyer.

Bell agreed, adding that Envetec Sustainable Technologies has worked with a number of biomanufacturing and biopharma companies as well as hospitals to recycle their plastic waste into reusable feedstock. With industry interest in this kind of technology, Bell believes that there will be a shift in how lab waste is treated.

Looking at how the landscape has changed over the past few years, Sörme believes this change is already underway. For instance, more than 5,000 labs across over 50 countries use My Green Lab certification, indicating global awareness about the problem.

Sörme hopes that eventually, sustainability will be one of the core values in research organizations. “I would love for sustainability to be just as important as health and safety because…as a young person going into lab, you're taught that from day one, and it’s embedded in your thinking,” she said. “Wouldn't it be cool if sustainability was there as well?”