I work in healthcare and sometimes I think about the amount of waste I generate in a day and it’s wild
Health of humans is always excluded from plastic reduction laws and for good reason.
Yes, I would rather healthcare and science used 5x as much plastic as they do already and everyone else had to go completely wasteless than try to put any undue limits on them.
I used to work in a warehouse that made a HUGE deal about the employees using the proper recycling bin so the company can get a nice check from somewhere or other for “going green”
This warehouse recieved thousands of pallets every day.
Each pallet is wrapped with hundreds of square feet of plastic wrap.
Each box is individually wrapped with maybe 10ftsq-50 depending on size.
Each box contains goods in plastic bags. Many of them with plastic clamshell packaging.
The products get unwrapped, and placed in larger boxes on shelves.
When the items get distributed to stores, the items were put in plastic bags, boxed up and wrapped in plastic wrap, boxes placed on pallets that were automatically wrapped by machines in hundreds of square feet of plastic.
None of the plastic from the warehouse floor is separated from the general waste.
Remember, it’s your responsibility to reduce waste.
I loathe the trend to blame the end consumer for their waste and eliminate very publicly visible things like straws when the vast majority is caused by industry every step of the way. The amount of plastic I see in retail garbage bins is sickening, and the average customer has no clue because it’s all long before anything ends up on the shelf.
Then people stop using plastic cutlery and think they’re helping the planet meanwhile it’s just a facade to keep the real wasters off their radar.
I’ve seen the same or even worse. Pallets of stuff would be received, all wrapped up tight in an ungodly amount of plastic. The pallet would be unwrapped, plastic discarded and the contents scanned to confirm the correct items and number of items were present on the pallet. After each item was scanned and it’s serial number recorded, someone would go to validate the items. When validated and found to be correct, the items were again stacked on a pallet and wrapped by another ungodly amount of plastic. The terrible thing was, as I was outside of the distribution chain, I had a view on the bigger picture. Items would often go through several of these places, each doing the exact same. The amounts of plastic each item consumed in the process was huge. But it was necessary, errors were found often, so the steps needed to be done. And the pallets could often get wet, nobody would accept soggy cardboard, so it needed to be wrapped.
The issue is plastic is basically free and extremely good at what it does. A more permanent solution like encasing the goods in some other material, like wood or metal would be more expensive and do a worse job. It’s similar to asbestos, where the solution is so good, nothing else can compete. It took a mighty effort and strict laws to mostly abandon asbestos. I fear humanity has lost its will to live and won’t have it in us to ban single-use plastic.
Some places did use metal trollies instead of pallets, but the pallets were never really a problem. They were almost always made from sustainable woods, be re-used often, till they just about fell apart. After which they were sent out for recycling, either back into a refurbished pallet, or a stamped recycled wood pallet or other recycled wood product.
To avoid plastic waste, they use now paper straws …wrapped individualy in plastic. Genius
Its a matter of scale. If labs went through pipette tips the same way that fast food joints went through plastic straws, they’d be banned too.
No they wouldn’t. Banning straws is politically expedient, not effective policy. Straws are a tiny drop in the bucket of plastic waste. But they’re visible, largely optional, and have alternatives. It’s easy to make them look bad so a politician can look big by banning them. Your average person can feel like they’re making a difference by buying a reusable straw. The industrial scale plastic waste that happens out of sight is allowed to continue because nobody cares about actually doing anything. Everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something.
And we don’t throw pipette tips in the ocean, we throw them in the biohazard box. While not better for the environment, at least we don’t choke baby turtles.
How many of them get incinerated? I know most large hospitals near me do that but do they take the waste from the gazillion small labs & diagnostics places?
The lab is a much more controlled environment. I trust a lab tech to dispose of the tips as per protocol, which could reduce the number of tips that end up as litter.
Straws don’t pollute the oceans if you throw them in the trash. Well, unless that trash gets processed badly. Where I live trash gets burned. So I make sure to throw some straws in the river so the sea turtles can do coke off each others backs 😎
Good luck choking sea turtles by throwing straws in the river. The only turtles you’ll choke that way are the river turtles
Simple. Don’t throw them in the ocean. Why are you throwing them in the ocean?
How about people driving those trucks that directly dump mixed waste into the ocean? That’s a very common thing to do in South-East Asia. Plus, there are a zillion villages everywhere around there that dump all of their mixed waste into creeks going through them – to be brought “away”. Into the oceans.
That’s where almost half of all microplastic comes from. Then there’s the other approximately half that comes from cars’ tyres. And then a part of a percent that comes from drinking straws and such. Hooray.
I feel like you might be doing something wrong.
Why? Seems like a reasonable amount. In the boxes i used there was place for i believe 80 tips so when i had to pipet something in a 96well plate with multiple components that where not able to be mixed before i sometimes got through multiple boxes in a single session. (And yes i wish i had a digital multi pipet but even then it would not have alwqys been possible to use it.
I was joking, honestly. There are both multitip pipettes and experiments requiring a ridiculous amount of separate wells to be filled, both which will make a box disappear.
Multi-channel pipette goes brrrrrr
Having to dispense a different volume to every sample goes faaaaack.
That’s why you use pipetting robots. Just sit back and watch the show.
Well take the global number of people who do that and multiply it by their average yearly usage and then compare it against the global plastic straw usage in tons.
If it is far lower, it is fine.
If it is close or higher, just advocate for proper recycling/disposal.
