Us scientists have been the main workforce behind many significant development humanities have ever witnessed. From CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing that can potentially cure diseases to ending a pandemic that has been raging on for almost 2 years using the power of vaccine. We are here to make the world a better place, to help humanity thrives, to make everyday tasks a little bit easier for everyone. I have been in science for almost 5 years now and I love every bit of it, yet the more I look deeper into what I have been doing in the past 5 years, there is one problem among others that has really stood out to me the most: SCIENCE WASTE!
It is almost ironic to think that a discipline like biomedical research, with its main purpose, is to make human lives better, contribute more than 5 million tons of plastic waste alone every year, which is equal to a weight of more than 4 million cars. With the climate crisis has been going on, forest fire, global warming, heatwave, us biomedical researchers should not exclude ourselves from the global effort in controlling climate change. We are part of this ecosystem. We might think what we do has nothing to do with the world outside. Sometimes we are just too focus on the little cell and the little proteins wiggling about, and forget that what we do here in the lab is undoubtedly and directly affect the climate outside. With the ongoing global pandemic, the amount of plastic is actually not reduced. Think about that little blue mask you wear or hundreds and thousands of those plastic bottles of hand sanitisers we use to clean our hands every 5 minutes.
So what can we biomedical scientists can do to reduce the amount of waste we produce? Well, I have got a few ideas for you here. These are the little things that I have made changed to the way I work in the lab and I hope that you find this useful and maybe can apply to your own working habit too.
1. Reusing tin foil:
It has been calculated that the amount of carbon footprint from 1 single sheet of tin foil is 6 times higher than that of a plastic wrapper. That means you need to reuse tin foil at least 6 times to make it even. In our lab, tin foil is used to protect autoclaved plastic cylinders. We also use tin foil to protect our samples from direct light. But don’t throw them straight away after!! They are perfectly reusable as long as they are not crunched up together. Flatten the sheets and put them in a bowl like this and you can reuse it the next time you want to wrap your light-sensitive samples again.
2. Reuse your falcon tubes:
Now of course this is not always possible. But please give it a second or two to think whether your tube can be reused? I used to just throw them away straight after the first time I use them. I use them for western blot, they are amazing on the roller, perfect western each time. And you know what, give them a wash with hot water to get rid of any remnant antibody and they are good as new.
3. Use cylinder to transfer liquid:
This works well for experiments that don’t require precise pipetting and also you are dealing with larger volumes. I used to use plastic pipettes because they are convenient, and they are just a hand stretch away. They are great for small amounts of liquids, but 5ml or above, a cylinder works just fine. The reason is you can wash the cylinder again and reuse it the next time. But for a plastic pipette, I doubt you would wash it and probably would go straight to the bin.
4. Reuse your maxiprep tubes:
Speaking of reusing plastic tubes, the orange cap maxiprep tubes can also be easily washed and reuse. But give it a wash with some soap to make sure there’s no DNA remnant and they are good as new.
5. Use smaller plastic:
If you use pipettes to aspirate media, keep using the same one but add to the tip of it a pipette tip, whether it's 200ul or 1000ul. This allows you to reuse the larger pipette which would have more plastic with it and only waste smaller amounts of plastic with the pipette tips and of course no contamination because there is no direct contact between the pipette and the sample that you use, the tips are replaced each time.
6. Keep a box/flask/beaker full of long-lived reusable things:
I reuse my scalpels and cell scrapers all the time. You just need to give them a wipe with some ethanol and hot water and they are good to go. My western blots are just as nice as everybody else
7. Keep those falcon tube holders!!
One of the most useful things in the lab are those magical falcon tube holders we got from the manufacturers. Whether they are made of Styrofoam or cardboard, they make great equipment to hold tubes, transferring them around, etc. The cardboard one, in particular, fits nicely inside freezer shelves, make them ideal to organise those antibody tubes you have. So don’t throw them away.
8. Those pipette tip holders, don’t throw them away either
For the P2 and P200, you can use them to hold PCR tubes, those little f*ckers don’t stand anywhere but they have met their nemesis. For the P1000, they are perfect for the 1.5ml Eppendorf tubes too!
9. Scrap papers for note-taking and calculation:
I don’t know about you, but I like to note down my calculations when I’m doing them, and it would be a waste to just pull out a brand-new piece of paper just for a few C1V1 = C2V2 lines. So, I just reuse whatever scrap paper I have. You don’t need to keep them, anyway, so may just well give them a second purpose before throwing them away. That will basically double their lifespan and reduce the overall amount of paper waste.
10. Reuse your buffer solutions if possible:
So this one is totally dependent on what kind of solutions/experiments you do. But for western blotting, reuse your transfer buffer. In fact, you can reuse them for months and the transferring efficiency would stay relatively stable. Keep the buffer in the cold room can extend it even longer. Of course, throw it away if the colour change is too dramatic, but I found that even with a slight colour change, transferring still occurs as normal. This will help reduce the amount of chemical waste you use, the plastic bottle to store them, etc.
So there you have it, these are only a few tricks that I have been doing for my own research. They save you time from looking for new tubes to replace or running about panicking about not having enough methanol for your western blots. And above all, they contribute directly to the effort to reduce biomedical waste that every scientist should be on board too! If you have any other tips, leave them down in the comments so myself and others can all learn from each other :)