It’s a good time to plan for future disruptions by adding flexibility to your laboratory workflows. Continuing lab work is based on more than social distancing requirements. Your lab materials choices, your organization systems, and even your sterilization systems all factor into long term lab productivity. Read on to learn green lab tips that could help foster independence and ultimately protect the environment and human health.
Conserve rigid laboratory plastics
Replace plasticware with a supply of glass volumetric pipettes, Petri plates and steel cans to sterilize for re-use with an autoclave and glassware dryer. Polypropylene plastic materials stand up reasonably well to autoclaving depending on their resin formulation and geometry. Cole Palmer provides a fairly in-depth guide on how to autoclave lab plasticware. Use a metal loop to streak bacterial colonies instead of single-use disposable loops. Glass beads are reusable and work well to plate bacterial transformations. (Watch this NEBTV video to learn how.) For some experiments consider if your volumes are more suitable for a polystyrene multiwell plate than numerous polypropylene tubes. The re-use of all brands and most types of plastic pipette tips, except those with interior filters, can be automated with a TipNovus instrument. This instrument conserves plastic and offers a huge cost savings to labs over time.
Use laboratory gloves responsibly
The CDC does not recommend re-using disposable medical grade gloves. However, researchers should consider having a pair of chemical-resistant re-usable gloves on hand, such as those used by chemists and surgeons. Use these in place of disposables when it is safe for both you and your experimental samples to do so. Reasonably tactile glove designs are offered in multiple sizes by a select group of manufacturers. Even with re-usable gloves nitrile is still the optimal material choice. Nitrile gloves are less bulky than vinyl which greatly reduces storage space volume per box, as well as manufacturing and shipping environmental impacts. Nitrile has good chemical resistance to enable re-use with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide vapor treatment. Please note that Nitrile will degrade with heat, UV, or ozone treatments. MIT has shown through a life cycle analysis that it can be more sustainable to dispose of gloves using waste-to-energy service with up to date carbon filtering than to recycle them by current methods. It is still more sustainable to recycle non-contaminated lab gloves when your lab does not use waste-to-energy disposal.
Choose eco-friendly sterilization for reuse
Historically biomedical facilities had moved away from in house sterilization of waste and re-usable materials to using single-use plastic devices and outsourcing to waste service companies. COVID-19 has put a new focus on sterilization technologies for healthcare devices at the point of use and improving the sustainability of disposal. Especially since air pollution is now considered as a risk factor for COVID-19, you can both foster independent functioning and reduce sources of air pollution related to lab work.
The environmental impact of sterilization methods are very differet. Ethylene oxide sterilization is widely used for a variety of materials in the healthcare and biomedical research sectors. The U.S. EPA understands the need for it but is concerned about its threat to human health. See: EPA raises concern about elevated cancer risk for people living around B. Braun plant near Allentown. There are better sterilization technologies available for lab materials that do not stand up to autoclaving or heat sterilization methods. Ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide-based sterilizer machines used in healthcare settings are available in sizes appropriate for bioscience facilities.
Please also consider upstream sources of air pollution. Plastic devices a.k.a. consumables are necessary for lab work - but they are not all created equally. X-ray and E-beam sterilization methods are environmentally preferable to ethylene oxide whenever possible. A good example of a lab supplier that uses eco-friendly sterilization would be Labcon. They use eco-friendly e-beam sterilization. While all medical grade plastics are required to be toxin-free, so leaching isn’t a big concern, Labcon takes it to the next level by using a carbon negative plastic resin produced by a sustainable award-winning Brazilian producer, Braskem. You might have heard of Braskem recently since its U.S. employees were featured in the news for living and working inside their Pennsylvania based plant for 28 days straight to produce plastic for healthcare PPE. Cheers to them!
Just-in-time ordering and 5S organization for ramp up and ramp down
COVID19 has changed working conditions and may require further lab shutdowns and restarts over time. It’s a new set of conditions that will test lab operations and supply chains. It might seem counterintuitive, but researchers will still benefit from running a “lean lab” by saving time and material consumption.
The "just in time" ordering system for single-use disposable supplies has failed healthcare due to the scale involved. According to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, COVID-19 has massively increased healthcare and clinical testing needs which has caused lab materials from different producers to run low. Conventional wisdom has been to ensure you have multiple vendors in your supply chain so that you can switch quickly when one runs out. Since even this strategy failed It has been nice to see 3D printed materials produced by good actors to fill in a few gaps in the medical supply chain. Of course the fact remains that rapid plastic molding is necessary to produce millions of personal protective face shields, gloves, and lab testing supplies fast. In contrast, research labs may find small-scale, on-site, 3D printer manufacturing useful to repair or replace back ordered devices or equipment. Clever lab groups even feed non-contaminated, used, lab plastic into extruder machines to produce 3D printer filaments. If you are interested, you can find some free resources for 3D printed biology lab equipment here.
Laboratory organization, particularly in academic labs is worth a post COVID-19 re-vamp. Lab Manager magazine recently featured an MIT cleanroom media lab space that was able to shut in 15 minutes in response to COVID19. The lab uses both just in time ordering and the 5S organization system. The 5S system has five guiding principles to organize a workspace. Sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. Canan Dagdeviren ,Tolga Durak & David Sadat, the authors of the open access Advanced Intelligent Systems report Research Resiliency through lean labs remarked that “We have seen lean laboratory principles help eliminate raw‐material consumption and waste generation, increase efficiency, and decrease costs in our academic cleanroom, all while contributing to measurable improvements in our research output.”
Thank you for being “labconscious”!
Every biologist is familiar with the value of adaptation. I hope that biologists will retain a sense of optimism to be able to sustain life science discoveries, even during these uncertain times.
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