People in America who use pipet tips: probably 10k People who use plastic straws: 300 mil
Is my lab the only one with a pipette tip washer? Like seriously, we save SO much money on tips.
My lab in specific reuses tips up to six times before discarding them. It doesn’t seem to affect the accuracy.
Caveat: we only use 1ml (blue) and 200 ul (yellow) tips, so not sure if other fancy brands work this way.
I recently saw paper straws for sale in a carboard box with a cutout so you could physically touch the straws. Naturally, I was revolted.
My headcanon says that this used to have a plastic window instead, until someone pointed out that having a plastic window in packaging of paper straws is ridiculous, so they decided to remove it. A package redesign without a window was also proposed, but was rejected for budgetary reasons.
The straw thing seems like such an inconsequential place to start over things like switching to bar soap and bar shampoo to avoid using so many plastic bottles.
bar shampoo gets a no from me, I have a HORRIBLE amount of hair/skin oil (genetic) and if I don’t wash my hair for even 1 day it looks like an absolute mess.
good news is that when I’m older I’ll have absolutely glorious hair though lol
I use bar shampoo and body wash. Daily, because i sweat a lot (genetics too).
I use bar stuff because i have to shower daily. It prevents so much waste, because i work through soap fast, so at least i am not producing plastic waste.
If you have to wash your hair a lot, thats an argument for bar shampoo, not against.
Nooooooooo please oh no, pleasee, you can’t make me use bar soap please noo.
I seriously hate it, maybe saving the planet is not worth it after all /j…= but also those bottles are refillable while straws are not only single use but are thrown away way more often.
You do you. I switched to bar shampoo and I like it so much more!
How much shampoo are you going through???
Think of it in scale. It’s not just you. It’s millions of people. Even if every household only used one bottle over one year that still would be tons of tons of (easily to avoid) waste. And of course it’s a lot more than one bottle a year.
lab rats who use a pipette robot that eats boxes of tips:
Plastic nowadays is inevitable, but at least the use of biodegradable plastic made from modified natural pulps is growing. Plastic is just a generic term for artificial materials and not all of them are harmful, and a lot of these also can be easy recycled. PET are often converted to filaments for 3D printers or yarns for clothing. Bad only if they are thrown into nature or into the sea
Ah, but you must see that recycling costs money! It’s cheaper to pretend you’re recycling and just throw it in the oceans and rivers and landscapes!
I hate it here. We even throw out online returns nearly 100% of the time for all it’s worth, it’s fucking crazy.
I work in healthcare and sometimes I think about the amount of waste I generate in a day and it’s wild
Plastic recycling in the home is basically a scam, but at the scale of a hospital where you’re generating large amounts of the same (known) plastic that’s going in its own bin, it’s much easier to recycle. I just bought a bunch of recycled PET that mostly came from medical waste.
Tbf, I remember the times we reused everything, even tubes.
And it was a mess and there is so much evidence that the whole process of reusing is even worse for the environment.
Health of humans is always excluded from plastic reduction laws and for good reason.
Yes, I would rather healthcare and science used 5x as much plastic as they do already and everyone else had to go completely wasteless than try to put any undue limits on them.
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I used to work in a warehouse that made a HUGE deal about the employees using the proper recycling bin so the company can get a nice check from somewhere or other for “going green”
This warehouse recieved thousands of pallets every day.
Each pallet is wrapped with hundreds of square feet of plastic wrap.
Each box is individually wrapped with maybe 10ftsq-50 depending on size.
Each box contains goods in plastic bags. Many of them with plastic clamshell packaging.
The products get unwrapped, and placed in larger boxes on shelves.
When the items get distributed to stores, the items were put in plastic bags, boxed up and wrapped in plastic wrap, boxes placed on pallets that were automatically wrapped by machines in hundreds of square feet of plastic.
None of the plastic from the warehouse floor is separated from the general waste.
Remember, it’s your responsibility to reduce waste.
It’d be great if more and more companies packaged their foods through EcoEnclose or similar.
It’d be even better if this was made default by legislation that eliminates the need for good will.
I loathe the trend to blame the end consumer for their waste and eliminate very publicly visible things like straws when the vast majority is caused by industry every step of the way. The amount of plastic I see in retail garbage bins is sickening, and the average customer has no clue because it’s all long before anything ends up on the shelf.
Then people stop using plastic cutlery and think they’re helping the planet meanwhile it’s just a facade to keep the real wasters off their radar.
Also, I would LOVE to buy stuff not wrapped in plastic, but it doesn’t exist. There are no glass bottles of milk anymore, no soy-butcher
glass costs and weighs significantly more than plastic
I’ve seen the same or even worse. Pallets of stuff would be received, all wrapped up tight in an ungodly amount of plastic. The pallet would be unwrapped, plastic discarded and the contents scanned to confirm the correct items and number of items were present on the pallet. After each item was scanned and it’s serial number recorded, someone would go to validate the items. When validated and found to be correct, the items were again stacked on a pallet and wrapped by another ungodly amount of plastic. The terrible thing was, as I was outside of the distribution chain, I had a view on the bigger picture. Items would often go through several of these places, each doing the exact same. The amounts of plastic each item consumed in the process was huge. But it was necessary, errors were found often, so the steps needed to be done. And the pallets could often get wet, nobody would accept soggy cardboard, so it needed to be wrapped.
The issue is plastic is basically free and extremely good at what it does. A more permanent solution like encasing the goods in some other material, like wood or metal would be more expensive and do a worse job. It’s similar to asbestos, where the solution is so good, nothing else can compete. It took a mighty effort and strict laws to mostly abandon asbestos. I fear humanity has lost its will to live and won’t have it in us to ban single-use plastic.
Some places did use metal trollies instead of pallets, but the pallets were never really a problem. They were almost always made from sustainable woods, be re-used often, till they just about fell apart. After which they were sent out for recycling, either back into a refurbished pallet, or a stamped recycled wood pallet or other recycled wood product.
Its a matter of scale. If labs went through pipette tips the same way that fast food joints went through plastic straws, they’d be banned too.
Some estimates claim that (life) science produces about 2% of worldwide plastic waste even though only 0.1% of the population works in this industry. I’m not sure how accurate these estimates are, but I find them believable considering how much waste I see every day in labs. On the upside, this waste usually stays in contained systems and doesn’t end up in the ocean.
And we don’t throw pipette tips in the ocean, we throw them in the biohazard box. While not better for the environment, at least we don’t choke baby turtles.
The lab is a much more controlled environment. I trust a lab tech to dispose of the tips as per protocol, which could reduce the number of tips that end up as litter.
How many of them get incinerated? I know most large hospitals near me do that but do they take the waste from the gazillion small labs & diagnostics places?
In the three countries I worked in (netherlands, belgium and usa) all level 2 lab waste was collected in biohazard boxes and taken to special lab waste management. I assume they get the same treatment as hospital waste. We did have the non-biohazard labs in which pipettes just went in the normal trash. I assume you can’t get a biohazard lab approved without organizing special waste pickup.
No they wouldn’t. Banning straws is politically expedient, not effective policy. Straws are a tiny drop in the bucket of plastic waste. But they’re visible, largely optional, and have alternatives. It’s easy to make them look bad so a politician can look big by banning them. Your average person can feel like they’re making a difference by buying a reusable straw. The industrial scale plastic waste that happens out of sight is allowed to continue because nobody cares about actually doing anything. Everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something.
To avoid plastic waste, they use now paper straws …wrapped individualy in plastic. Genius
Straws don’t pollute the oceans if you throw them in the trash. Well, unless that trash gets processed badly. Where I live trash gets burned. So I make sure to throw some straws in the river so the sea turtles can do coke off each others backs 😎
Good luck choking sea turtles by throwing straws in the river. The only turtles you’ll choke that way are the river turtles
The river turtles collect the plastic straws and bring them downstream to the sea turtles. Basic nature stuff.
Where do you think the river goes?
Who cares? out of sight, out of mind.
How about people driving those trucks that directly dump mixed waste into the ocean? That’s a very common thing to do in South-East Asia. Plus, there are a zillion villages everywhere around there that dump all of their mixed waste into creeks going through them – to be brought “away”. Into the oceans.
That’s where almost half of all microplastic comes from. Then there’s the other approximately half that comes from cars’ tyres. And then a part of a percent that comes from drinking straws and such. Hooray.
Simple. Don’t throw them in the ocean. Why are you throwing them in the ocean?
Well take the global number of people who do that and multiply it by their average yearly usage and then compare it against the global plastic straw usage in tons.
If it is far lower, it is fine.
If it is close or higher, just advocate for proper recycling/disposal.
Do you think plastic straws are banned in the places with waste management that allow plastics to be dumped in the ocean?
In my country pretty much every fast food straw lands in a fast food bin or in someone’s car and thence into household rubbish
None of that goes into water courses
Asia on the other hand has some pretty poor countries with crap rubbish handling
I feel like you might be doing something wrong.
Why? Seems like a reasonable amount. In the boxes i used there was place for i believe 80 tips so when i had to pipet something in a 96well plate with multiple components that where not able to be mixed before i sometimes got through multiple boxes in a single session. (And yes i wish i had a digital multi pipet but even then it would not have alwqys been possible to use it.
I was joking, honestly. There are both multitip pipettes and experiments requiring a ridiculous amount of separate wells to be filled, both which will make a box disappear.
Multi-channel pipette goes brrrrrr
Having to dispense a different volume to every sample goes faaaaack.
That’s why you use pipetting robots. Just sit back and watch the show.
Also used a heap of tips (unless it’s the kind that washes, those are weird)
I know. They’re definitely not environment friendly. Still much better than manual pipetting.
It takes the resources it takes. Can’t just go “we’re stopping doing science because it uses plastic, sorry everyone”.
Yeah. True. I’m a programmer of those things and I make an effort to be as efficient as possible with tips, ie mixing with the same tip and compensating accuracy for it. It’s more difficult but worth the effort imo.
Also reuse for things like reagents makes a big difference.
