What would you do after retiring from a life long career in a field you loved? In April Blodgett’s case, she saw a way to give back by enabling science education and new avenues of research with her volunteer work as the “Pipetting Pigeon”.

Labconscious thanks April for the following interview and her sizable positive contribution to cost savings and waste diversion for life science! We hope her story will inspire biologists to find similar opportunities to conserve scientific resources.

You might be skeptical looking at plastic recycling in the lab and you probably should be. The expectation is that carefully sorted non-contaminated recycling collections will be remanufactured into products that will lower the demand for fossil fuel-based plastic. Unfortunately, according to the report, The Real Truth About the U.S. Plastics Recycling Rate, the conversion of plastic recycling collections into new materials, known as source reduction, has failed. Mixed plastic collections are especially at risk.