I was quite the little activist when I was younger. A proud member of my high school’s environmental science club (dork), I made my parents’ lives miserable. I subjected them to drawn out and impassioned lectures on growing landfills and thinning ozone layer whenever I spotted a recyclable in the regular trash. And then I started working in a lab. The activism evaporated, along with the teenage angst (for the most part).
Labs are an environmentalist’s nightmare. The amount of waste that my lab generates every day makes paper mills look Earth-friendly. I can easily go through a box of latex gloves in one day, especially when working with RNA. I use approximately 14 6-well tissue culture plates every day along with countless (infinite, more like) pipette tips and pipettes, flasks, tubes, etc.
There is nothing I can do about it. I am not willing to risk my samples being contaminated and my experiments failing to save a pair of gloves or spare a pipette. I knew a girl who consciously conserved, re-used, and scraped in the lab to cut down on waste. The lesson I learned from her? It’s amazing how yeast take to LB plates when one doesn’t wear gloves when plating bacteria.
Pretty starburst, in a herpes-tainted sort of way.
Since conservation is out, how about recycling? Umm, no. Would you want to drink soda out of a plastic bottle that you knew was manufactured from plastic previously used to pipette biohazardous agents? Nope. What about all the plastic and glass bottles? Same thing. They cannot go back into circulation considering what was stored in them, chemicals and toxins being the tip of the unappetizing iceberg. Instead, they are autoclaved and trucked far out of my sight, to sit for eternity in a giant red-bagged waste dump.
It’s a shame, it really is. I single-handedly generate more plastic waste in a day than a non-lab worker goes through in 6 months (I am guessing). There is nothing I can do about it other than tell myself that I am working for a good cause. Just like furry lab supplies, using massive amounts of plastic and glass is a necessary evil of lab work.
I recycle at home in the hopes of adding a few points to my suffering karma (mouse killer and Earth polluter? I am not doing so well). I would rather save my activism for promoting the HPV vaccine.
P.S. That is not my waste bucket, I swear. I am far too anal retentive to let it get to that point.
Great pictures Anna! I’ve just gotten back from my 10-day stint in a molecular bio lab (on a fellowship for science journalists) and all five of us journalists were quite shocked at how much we were throwing away: pipet tips, petri dishes, eppendorf tubes, glass slides, kimwipes, gloves, gloves and more gloves. I was trying to stay sterile when transferring some cultures (no fumehood, just a Bunsen burner) and I accidentally let the tip of the pipet touch the benchtop. Oops, into the garbage it went, and I hadn’t even used it.
We told our instructors how we thought it was so much waste and they agreed, but I don’t think it was something they thought about a lot. Sadly, the same thing happened to us journalists. After a few days in the lab, we were automatically tossing out stuff, without a thought or comment.
Welcome back! Glad to hear you survived your intense lab experience.
It is unpleasant to consciously waste so much but that’s the nature of the business. You really just have to. So in a sense, it’s not really wasting. Here is a million dollar business idea – coming up with a treatment to make plastic lab waste recyclable, somehow.
Cutting down on gloves is easy. I only really use them for RNA work and if I’m handling something nasty. Never for cell work, never for bugs; after all, gloves are no more sterile than your hands, and that’s what 70% ethanol is for anyway. Oh, and antibiotics of course. Bugs grow faster than yeast so it’s not usually a problem.
A few of us were thinking of re-introducing glass pipettes for cell culture, but then we have to have a mechanism for washing them, and have to sterilize them (so all that means more detergent, more water, more runs of the autoclave) and I’m not sure health and safety would let us anyway.
It’s funny you should bring up glass pipettes. I wrote a long paragraph about them and deleted it. They seem like much more of a pain then they’re worth. They have to be washed, re-stuffed, autoclaved, and handled with utmost care. I have a tendency to drop things, especially late at night. If I were using glass pipettes, I would spend the next year of grad school picking up glass shards from the floor.
And I am anal enough to spray my gloves with ethanol.
beautiful lab-art!
Thank you, Alexey! I did not know there was such a thing as lab art. I will use a keener eye on my surroundings from now on.