Reduce plastic waste in the lab with pipette tip refills

Search

Topics

Home

Subscribe in a reader

Other IzziDs

Site Map -- Disclaimer

Reduce plastic waste in the lab with pipette tip refills

Summary: Experimental biologists typically care about the environment and wish they could recycle or lessen their plastic waste. Pipette tip refills are an excellent and easy way to lessen your plastic waste in the lab.

Article created: Jan 15, 2008
Article by: Jeremiah Faith

Click image for larger

In the over four years I've been working as an experimentalist, two different people have tried to start a recycling program for our plastic waste; virtually everyone that works in our lab for the first time sees how much plastic waste experimental biology work generates and asks if there's a way to recycle it. Every attempt to recycle plastic waste in our lab has come to a halt when the recycling company finds out that our plastics come in contact with hazardous chemicals and biohazards.

Given that it is often not possible to recycle this waste, I think we experimentalists have an obligation to use as little plastic as necessary to perform our work. The biggest use of plastic in a biology wetlab is typically pipette tips. So how can we have our pipette tips and use less plastic too?

Buying a bag of pipette tips uses the least amount of plastic

The tips themselves make up around 25% of the plastic (by weight) in a full pipette tip box. The most affordable way to buy pipette tips is also the most environmentally friendly; the companies that make the pipette tip boxes sell bags of individual tips, which you can take one-at-a-time and fill your empty boxes with. After you add the tips to each box, you simply autoclave the box and you're ready to go. With this approach, you can reuse the entire tip box, and you dispose of 75% less plastic.

The problems with the individual tip approach are 1) it takes forever to fill a large number of tip boxes with individual tips and 2) the more you handle your tips the easier it is to contaminate them with DNA, RNA, RNAses, DNAses, etc. I personally never buy tips this way. One lab I was in had a large number of undergraduate student assistants (i.e. very cheap labor) who would fill in the boxes with individual tips, but even in such cases I think there are better uses for everyone's time.

Buying a box of pipette tip refills provides a more practical option

The part I'm holding is the tip refill. The clear plastic tip box is reused.
Click image for larger

Increasingly, pipette tip manufacturers are providing a refill option. With refill tips the top portion of the pipette tip box holds the tips and is removable, so you can at least reuse the plastic bottom portion of the tip box (see image on the right). The plastic bottom portion represents 40-60% of the plastic (by weight) in a full pipette tip box.

Click image for larger

The refill tips arrive in a stack of around ten refills (see image on the right). To fill an pipette tip box, you simply remove the empty top portion of your pipette tip box and replace it with a filled top portion from the refill tip stack. After opening the refill box, you must be careful to keep it upright at all times. If the refill box falls over on its side, you have a big mess. Also, when you take a new rack of tips from the refill tip stack, look at the bottom of the new rack to make sure no tips from the rack below are stuck to it.

In addition to saving plastic, using tip refills also saves money. Tip refills are substantially cheaper than ordering prefilled boxes but more expensive than ordering a bag of individual tips. The only downsides I've noticed with using tip refills are that the reusable boxes get weaker with age and that the boxes get a little sticky overtime due to the addition and removal of autoclave tape with each box reuse. I simply replace the old worn out with new ones over time.

Data Sources

I calculated the plastic proportions above with a high-precision lab scale using 10ul refill tips from biohit, 10ul refill tips from finntip, and 200ul refill tips from finntip.