4 ms·

The nasty part of reducing waste in labs is that it depends a lot on the type of material that you're handling, so the know-how of one lab won't necessarily hel

The nasty part of reducing waste in labs is that it depends a lot on the type of material that you're handling, so the know-how of one lab won't necessarily help another. Just for the sake of example. The lab in the article is handling biological material, and the toxins being quantified are likely organic, at worst heavy metals in rather diluted concentrations. In those situations, compostable containers are a viable solution, and the glassware can be easily cleaned. The same approach would not work for a lab handling organochlorines, where composting anything would be insane - you're causing less harm to the environment by incinerating the contaminated material and forcing the gases through a water column. And if you're handling large concentrations of heavy metals, cleaning will be way more involved than using liberal amounts of piranha solution.

Animats 4y ago
How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles?
- vkou 4y ago
  Grad students aren't very expensive.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    At least at the org I worked at, there were dedicated glass washers paid around minimum wage. It's dangerous between the stuff you're dealing with in the containers, and things like the washing chemicals, the autoclave units, and so on.
  - eru 4y ago
    At least in terms of money. You still have opportunity costs, though.
  - smacke 4y ago
    I think this depends. Universities seem to have the power to generate "tuition waivers" that accompany TA positions and a few external fellowships such as NSF GRFP, but if you're funded solely from one or more of your advisor's grants, I believe that, at most places, the grants are actually used to fund the full cost of tuition. And as we all know, tuition is kind of insane at most places due to bloated admin. Source: what I remember my advisor telling me when I was a grad student
- lvxferre 4y ago
  > How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles? "They", who? Marine Institute? Probably zero, due to the nature of their samples (biological material) and scale (~8 samples/day). I wouldn't be surprised if they just leave the flasks overnight in a sodium hypochlorite solution. The same however might not apply to a laboratory handling another type of sample, where cleaning the glassware might involve multiple solutions, or might require that the glassware "soaks" in the cleaning solution for a large amount of time, or handling a larger amount of daily samples. And it isn't just a matter of the required workforce to clean those flasks, but also additional space being used, or actually increasing waste and electricity usage through the cleaning process. That's my point anyway - those results from the Marine Institute don't generalise so well.
  - ggm 4y ago
    I was bottle washing in a marine bio lab in 1978. We used an Analar product to wash glassware which didn't measure dissolved phosphate levels and iirc Chromic acid for the ones which did. From memory, the colorimeter was pretty shit at phosphate anyway. We did glass pipettes for everything and they were a royal pain to rinse until I rigged an automatic syphon made with a 2l measure and some plastic bits. I went to work stoned and fell over carrying a week's glass back to the drying cab. I think I won the lab sweepstake for breakage value that day. 200 trips to the firth of forth seaside towns, one pair of gumboots, and a labcoat which was stolen the first week of uni in 1979. Coastal estuarine waterflow is fascinating.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles? Good to get your message, it makes sense. OTOH in the nicely appointed laboratory where the glassware cabinets are well stocked with spares, and hopefully breakage is low, by comparison there is virtually no burden from consumables as they move from trucks, to warehouses. Then delivery people streaming into the lab, days or weeks of supplies oveflowing from limited storage cabinets, and with waste removal operators following in turn. IME there is much less of a use for disposables when the task does not need to be biologically sterile or when the cost can not be passed on to somebody like an insurance company. In testing and research, but I'm industrial not clinical. When I run it as a business, my clients deserve the best. Sometimes cleaning glassware in advance and after a particular test or experiment, before returning the glassware to the shelf, needs to be routine. Still that's only a handful of additional steps in what often amounts to a 1000-step process when you count every little thing. And for that you've got to have chemists who take pride in every step, it's really no problem when they're already on staff. >We observed the biggest cost savings from reducing operating times of fume hoods and cutting our use of organic solvents in the lab. Energy is always so costly and exhaust blowers really compromise the climate control effectiveness. We have enough toxics that we depend on the constant flow of fresh air coming in to the whole lab as the hoods must stay on 24/7 with the sash at the calibrated height marked by the safety operator according to OSHA requirements. So I've spent a lot of time over the years cutting waste in other ways since we're stuck wasting a significant amount of air-conditioning around-the-clock. Don't get me started on organic solvents . . .
ramraj07 4y ago
The absolute majority of biology labs do things that don’t need disposable material. It used to be many used radioactive reagents but their use has decreased significantly as well. My lab used to use glass pipettes well into the 2010s because they were the miserliest PIs ever among other things. They only allowed everyone to use disposable pipettes when they became cheap enough or cheaper than the extra lab tech it needed to keep the pipettes flowing. Most labs can totally very easily cut down on 80% of their waste output with a tiny bit of extra grease and some process change. Heck if you really want to, you can go further - even consumables no one in western labs would think to reuse, like tissue culture flasks and pipette tips, were reused in my lab in india because they were poor. Discard tips that didn’t touch any bad reagent into a separate box for washing and ruse them for non critical steps, not that hard. Tissue culture flasks can’t be washed but you can reuse them multiple times without significant issues. For most cell line cultures this should have no effect on the result.
- feet 4y ago
  I wonder if glass micropipette tips are viable

Animats 4y ago

How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles?

vkou 4y ago
Grad students aren't very expensive.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  At least at the org I worked at, there were dedicated glass washers paid around minimum wage. It's dangerous between the stuff you're dealing with in the containers, and things like the washing chemicals, the autoclave units, and so on.
- eru 4y ago
  At least in terms of money. You still have opportunity costs, though.
- smacke 4y ago
  I think this depends. Universities seem to have the power to generate "tuition waivers" that accompany TA positions and a few external fellowships such as NSF GRFP, but if you're funded solely from one or more of your advisor's grants, I believe that, at most places, the grants are actually used to fund the full cost of tuition. And as we all know, tuition is kind of insane at most places due to bloated admin. Source: what I remember my advisor telling me when I was a grad student
lvxferre 4y ago
> How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles? "They", who? Marine Institute? Probably zero, due to the nature of their samples (biological material) and scale (~8 samples/day). I wouldn't be surprised if they just leave the flasks overnight in a sodium hypochlorite solution. The same however might not apply to a laboratory handling another type of sample, where cleaning the glassware might involve multiple solutions, or might require that the glassware "soaks" in the cleaning solution for a large amount of time, or handling a larger amount of daily samples. And it isn't just a matter of the required workforce to clean those flasks, but also additional space being used, or actually increasing waste and electricity usage through the cleaning process. That's my point anyway - those results from the Marine Institute don't generalise so well.
- ggm 4y ago
  I was bottle washing in a marine bio lab in 1978. We used an Analar product to wash glassware which didn't measure dissolved phosphate levels and iirc Chromic acid for the ones which did. From memory, the colorimeter was pretty shit at phosphate anyway. We did glass pipettes for everything and they were a royal pain to rinse until I rigged an automatic syphon made with a 2l measure and some plastic bits. I went to work stoned and fell over carrying a week's glass back to the drying cab. I think I won the lab sweepstake for breakage value that day. 200 trips to the firth of forth seaside towns, one pair of gumboots, and a labcoat which was stolen the first week of uni in 1979. Coastal estuarine waterflow is fascinating.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
>How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles? Good to get your message, it makes sense. OTOH in the nicely appointed laboratory where the glassware cabinets are well stocked with spares, and hopefully breakage is low, by comparison there is virtually no burden from consumables as they move from trucks, to warehouses. Then delivery people streaming into the lab, days or weeks of supplies oveflowing from limited storage cabinets, and with waste removal operators following in turn. IME there is much less of a use for disposables when the task does not need to be biologically sterile or when the cost can not be passed on to somebody like an insurance company. In testing and research, but I'm industrial not clinical. When I run it as a business, my clients deserve the best. Sometimes cleaning glassware in advance and after a particular test or experiment, before returning the glassware to the shelf, needs to be routine. Still that's only a handful of additional steps in what often amounts to a 1000-step process when you count every little thing. And for that you've got to have chemists who take pride in every step, it's really no problem when they're already on staff. >We observed the biggest cost savings from reducing operating times of fume hoods and cutting our use of organic solvents in the lab. Energy is always so costly and exhaust blowers really compromise the climate control effectiveness. We have enough toxics that we depend on the constant flow of fresh air coming in to the whole lab as the hoods must stay on 24/7 with the sash at the calibrated height marked by the safety operator according to OSHA requirements. So I've spent a lot of time over the years cutting waste in other ways since we're stuck wasting a significant amount of air-conditioning around-the-clock. Don't get me started on organic solvents . . .

ramraj07 4y ago

The absolute majority of biology labs do things that don’t need disposable material. It used to be many used radioactive reagents but their use has decreased significantly as well. My lab used to use glass pipettes well into the 2010s because they were the miserliest PIs ever among other things. They only allowed everyone to use disposable pipettes when they became cheap enough or cheaper than the extra lab tech it needed to keep the pipettes flowing. Most labs can totally very easily cut down on 80% of their waste output with a tiny bit of extra grease and some process change. Heck if you really want to, you can go further - even consumables no one in western labs would think to reuse, like tissue culture flasks and pipette tips, were reused in my lab in india because they were poor. Discard tips that didn’t touch any bad reagent into a separate box for washing and ruse them for non critical steps, not that hard. Tissue culture flasks can’t be washed but you can reuse them multiple times without significant issues. For most cell line cultures this should have no effect on the result.

feet 4y ago
I wonder if glass micropipette tips are viable