Reducing and reusing lab equipment and consumables is more impactful in the waste reduction hierarchy than recycling lab consumables. You can reduce your lab waste by:

• only producing intermediary lab reagents at the amounts required
• planning experiments to avoid repeats and waste by using the minimum amounts of chemicals and samples
• using items to their full potential, for example:
  • using all wells in a multi-well plate before disposing of it, or sharing it with another lab user
  • dividing agar plates into several parts to test multiple conditions on a single plate

Reduce your plastic waste

Substitute single-use plastics for reusable materials

Reusable items sometimes have a higher upfront cost but the savings from multiple purchases of single-use alternatives often make up for this. Additionally, the environmental cost of reusing decontaminated glass or metal items is usually less than the environmental cost of single-use items.

There are a range of swaps you could make to reduce your use of single-use plastics, though you must take responsibility for following relevant health and safety policies. For example, you could try swapping:

• disposable and nitrile gloves for thicker, reusable gloves
• plastic labels for reusable markers or biodegradable tape
• falcon tubes for bijou bottles
• plastic reservoirs for metal or glass reservoirs
• plastic Petri dishes for glass Petri dishes
• inoculation loops for metal inoculation loops
• colony-picking sticks for wooden sticks
• pipettes for glass pipettes

When working with others in your lab, encourage them to use reusables instead of single-use plastics by sharing viable and successful swaps that you have made. You could also try storing reusable items in a more prominent place.

Washing and reusing ‘single-use’ items

Washed items can be placed in a plastic reservoir to be used in appropriate experiments, for example, label serological pipettes used to transfer common, non-sterile solutions (such as ethanol and concentrated buffer solutions) with the appropriate working solution and store them next to the pipette controller.

You can decontaminate ‘single-use’ items for reuse, where suitable. For example:

• submerge plastic cuvettes and pipette tips in 10% Distel for 16 to 24 hours, then rinse with tap water
• if further sterility is required, some plastics such as falcon tubes are very resilient to the autoclave process, and therefore can be reused many times

If you are hesitant, you could perform decontamination tests on decontaminated items to check whether they are suitable for your activities.

If your lab cannot use the decontaminated plastics because your experiments require strict sterility, consider sharing them with other labs that can use them.

Dealing with plastic waste

While there are steps you can take to minimise your use of plastics, particularly focusing on single-use items, there is always going to be a requirement for them in conducting lab activities.

Where that is the case, take steps to maximise recycling potential to reduce the environmental impact.

Reuse resources in your lab

Repurposing lab equipment

Maintain, repair, and reuse computers for as long as possible to minimise electronic waste. This is preferable to replacing broken equipment as 70% to 80% of a computer’s carbon footprint comes from its production.

Give your unwanted equipment to organisations that refurbish and sell secondhand equipment, for example:

• UniGreenScheme, a second-hand marketplace for laboratory equipment, which shares the profits of any resale with the original owner
• Richmond Scientific, which purchases lab equipment and offers a lab clearance service

Consumables

Think about how you could repurpose empty containers and used items in your lab. For example, you can use polystyrene boxes to fill empty space in freezers, which helps maintain temperature stability and reduces the energy consumption of freezers.

Share any chemicals, consumables, or equipment you no longer need with other laboratories. You can manage your chemicals using the ChemInventory system. All labs at Bath are required to use this system and if your lab is not already registered, you should contact your technical team.

Collect used Winchester bottles for suppliers to collect and reuse.