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From waste to resource: The untapped value of the separate collection of single-use laboratory plastics to enable recycling
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An audit of laboratory plastic waste found that 87% by weight was recyclable polymer, and a separate-collection scheme for polystyrene and polypropylene achieved 85% user acceptance while enabling high-quality monostream recycling. Laboratories generate an estimated 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, making this blueprint for lab plastic circularity directly relevant to reducing a significant and largely untracked source of plastic entering waste streams.
In the face of the sustainability crisis, scientific laboratories, as resource-intensive units, must conduct research more sustainably.They are estimated to produce 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste per year.Clearly, there is a need for more circularity: Reduce-and-reuse frameworks for laboratory plastics exist to a small extent, but none for the recycling of disposed single-use articles.Biologically contaminated plastics from life science labs are disinfected by autoclaving after use, transforming them into conventional residual waste that is mostly incinerated, creating high CO2 eq.emissions.However, this waste stream consists of high-quality polymers, for which (thermo-)mechanical recycling is technically possible.Therefore, we performed a waste assessment of lab plastics and found that 87% (w/w) of the residual waste consisted of recyclable plastics.However, autoclaving causes these mixed fractions to clump together.Thus, we created a separate collection scheme for the two most abundant plastic types, polystyrene and polypropylene, enabling us to retrieve high-quality monostream polymer fractions for (thermo-)mechanical recycling.This study is the first to present a transferable blueprint with detailed instructions for other institutions on how to implement the separate collection scheme, obtained user feedback on feasibility, and demonstrated 85% user acceptance.Further, this study provides the first quantitative assessment of emission-saving potential associated with substituting incineration with (thermo-)mechanical recycling for laboratory single-use plastics.For two end-of-life scenarios -an institution-specific scenario at the University of Konstanz (waste incinerated in Weinfelden, Switzerland) and a national average (Germany) scenario -we calculated the average annual emissionsaving potentials for the extrapolated arising waste amount to be up to 12.4 t CO2 eq. and 8.6 t CO2 eq., respectively.Therefore, a separate collection of lab plastic waste offers an easy-to-implement measure to reduce the amount of incinerated plastic waste, and thereby emissions, and increase the sustainability of laboratory research.
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