Scientific research is a largely ignored consumer of single-use plastics, with the biomedical sciences a particularly high-volume offender. Plastic petri dishes, bottles of various shapes and sizes, several types of glove, a dizzying array of pipettes and pipette tips, a hoard of sample tubes and vials: They have all become an everyday part of scientific research.
Most of us will never use such equipment, but without it, we would not have the knowledge, technologies, products and medicines we all rely on. It is vital to 21st-century lives, but it is also extremely polluting.
In 2015, researchers at the University of Exeter weighed their bioscience department’s annual plastic waste, and extrapolated that biomedical and agricultural laboratories worldwide could be responsible for 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste a year. To put that in context, they said that this was equal to 83 percent of the plastic recycled worldwide in 2012.
Illustration: Mountain People
Modern science has grown up with the idea that plastic is disposable, but times are changing. This autumn, the first wave of young people to follow the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and go on “school strike for the climate” started undergraduate degrees. Universities can expect these young people to bring fresh and sometimes challenging questions about how scientific research is conducted.
At the same time, many of those from Generation Z (those born from the mid-1990s onwards) are now starting doctorates, and millennials (born from the early 1980s) are leading more and more laboratories. As more universities challenge themselves to eradicate plastic waste, notably in their canteens, as well as to go zero-carbon, scientific waste is increasingly coming under the microscope.
In November last year, the University of Leeds pledged to go single-use-plastic-free by 2023. Recently, University College London announced it would follow suit, with a target date of 2024. These new policies would not just banish disposable coffee cups from campuses, but a lot of everyday scientific equipment.
Leeds sustainability project officer Lucy Stuart said that reaction among researchers has been mixed, but the institution is gradually making progress.
“For us, as a university, we are here to inspire the next generation,” she said. “Also, we are a research-based institution that is creating groundbreaking innovation every day. So we didn’t want to say the solutions aren’t possible, because we are the people that help create those solutions.”
One reason laboratory plastics are such a sticky problem is that they can be contaminated with the biological or chemical matter being studied. Researchers cannot simply toss them in the campus recycling bins with their coffee cups.
Usually, laboratory waste plastics are bagged and autoclaved — an energy- and water-intensive sterilization process often using pressurized steam — and then they are sent to a landfill.
University of York biomedical researcher David Kuntin said that not all plastic waste is too contaminated to recycle.
“The contamination we deal with is probably less dangerous than a moldy tin of beans you might have in your recycling after a few weeks,” Kuntin said.
Accordingly, he and his colleagues set to work. They developed a “decontamination station” with a 24-hour soak in a high-level disinfectant, followed by a rinse for chemical decontamination. They also looked at the plastics they were buying, to pick ones that would be easier to recycle. As a result of these measures, they have reduced the plastic they were previously sending to landfill by about 1 tonne a year.
“That’s 20 workers, 20 of us,” Kuntin said, sounding as if he still does not quite believe that so few researchers could pile up so much waste.
“We used a tonne of plastic that we can recycle,” he said.
They determined that it was enough to fill 110 bathtubs. Because they have also cut down how much equipment must be autoclaved, they are saving energy and water, too.
“I think, as scientists, we need to be responsible about what we’re doing,” Kuntin said.
Not least, because it is public money that they are spending, he added.
“You can’t, with a clean conscience, just be using a tonne of plastic,” he said.
At the University of Bristol, technicians Georgina Mortimer and Saranna Chipper-Keating have also set up schemes for sorting and recycling lab waste.
“The waste in the lab was very easy for people to see,” Mortimer said. “They were like, ‘I do this at home.’”
They have been experimenting with glove and ice pack recycling through a company that specializes in hard-to-recycle waste, including contact lenses, potato chip packets and cigarette butts, as well as the sorts of plastics that come out of labs.
They said they are keen to think more about reuse and reduction, too, knowing that recycling can only take them so far. They have worked out how they can buy in bulk whenever possible, to cut down on packaging waste, for example.
Plastic is only part of the sustainable laboratory puzzle for them.
“We have a lot of ultra-low temperature freezers,” Mortimer said, adding that the freezers “have thousands, thousands of samples going back more than 20 years.”
They are all stored at minus -80oC — or at least they used to be. Bristol sustainable science manager Anna Lewis showed them some research from the University of Colorado Boulder, demonstrating that most samples can be safely stored at minus -70oC, saving up to a third of the energy required. They have now raised the temperature of their ultra-low temperature freezers.
The Bristol technicians said they have also been thinking about what they are storing in these freezers, how they are storing it and whether it needs to be there at all.
“There are samples that have been left there for years,” Mortimer said. “We’ve been discovering what these actually are, if they’re still usable, and consolidating the space.”
This has not just saved energy and money, it has also made working with the freezers more manageable. It is simply easier to find things.
Martin Farley became the UK’s first laboratory sustainability officer when he was appointed to the role by the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He now specializes in finding ways that research laboratories can become more sustainable, working in a similar role to Lewis in London.
He first entered the field because of plastics, but quickly found a whole range of issues to work on. Farley said that ultra-low temperature freezers can use as much energy as a house.
As the climate emergency intensifies, Farley said, “every facet of society needs to change.”
Laboratories might not be a “behemoth,” like the oil and gas industry, he said, but they have a significant and often ignored environmental impact. In a research-intensive university, the laboratories will account for about two-thirds of the energy bill, he said.
If a university is looking to reduce its energy use, research sciences are a good place to start.
“We have people recycling at home, and doing nothing in their labs. I did a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation,” Farley said, and, depending on the research area, “your impact on the environment is 100 to 125 times more than at home.”
For those looking for a plastic-free future for science, a technological fix could well be found in history. In Bristol, Mortimer has been eyeing up the contents of the old glass cabinets.
“We’re trying to get back into glassware, trying to make it cool again within our department,” she said.
Many people perceive plastic as indispensable to modern science. It can keep materials protected, even when transporting them. It keeps them away from people (for materials researchers do not want to contaminate) and it keep them out of the scientists (for hazardous materials that might hurt them). It can also be easily molded into a range of shapes. Some areas of science — not least DNA research — have grown up in an era of single-use plastic.
Yet in some cases a return to glass might be the answer.
“Use glassware — it’s there, it’s available, it’s sterilized,” Mortimer said. “All universities have a glass room just full to the ceilings of stuff that we can be using rather than plastics.”
Along with Chipper-Keating, she has been tasked with producing a whole-life costing exercise on glass versus plastics. In theory, it should be cheaper to reuse glass than to buy plastics again and again, especially as there are often costs associated with dumping these plastics.
However, reusing glass means it must be washed and sterilized, which takes resources, too. This is a concern for Stuart, as Leeds does not want its plastic-free pledge to simply replace one environmental problem with another.
Kuntin is also concerned about the knock-on effects of switching back to glass.
“Every day, we use reagents like cell culture media — a nutrient broth that cells thrive in. These broths have been developed for decades, and since most cells are grown on plastic, that’s what the reagents have been optimized for,” he said.
Additionally, researchers such as Kuntin are interested in the finest details of cell behavior — and what they are grown on could have an influence on how they behave.
“We know that cells are very responsive to their environment, and can sense things like the roughness or stiffness of the surface they grow on,” he said, adding that unexpected changes in behavior could be misinterpreted as a consequence of an experiment, when really it is just that the cells are behaving differently on glass.
Another problem is how much time reusing glass could take. Time, along with water and heat, can cost a laboratory money. However, laboratories would not know until they do a full analysis.
“We could do a whole-life costing exercise, and it may well be that plastics are so much cheaper,” Lewis said. “In which case, we would need subsidies.”
Lewis said that any real change would require altering how science is funded. Ideally, universities would be required to demonstrate some level of sustainability before they could apply for certain grants. There is only so far they can go working with the goodwill and interest of a few enthusiasts.
Lewis said she sees scope to address this, if not in the next Research Excellence Framework for assessing the quality of research in the UK in 2021, then in the one after that. Whether the ecological crisis can hold on for another decade of science policy negotiations is another matter.
Alice Bell is a writer, energy campaigner and head of communications at climate change charity 10:10. This is an edited version of an article first published by the Wellcome Institute on mosaicscience.com and was republished in The Observer under a Creative Commons licence.
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