Keeping it green

As landfill space declines, everyone is beginning to recycle, but how can you be sure your lab is doing its bit?

More and more lab managers, particularly in the Environmental and Higher Education sectors are looking at doing their bit for the environment, with many building improvements into their environmental accreditations. Being green, however, is not easy.

The first problem faced by many labs is that many traditional recyclers will not touch material emanating from laboratories because of fears that it might be chemically or biologically contaminated. These fears are driven partly by ignorance, and partly by bad experience. In the 1990s there were a number of incidents when partially full chemical bottles were sent for recycling alongside nominally empty ones, resulting in both injury, and equipment damage. This, with the “you touched it last” attitude that prevailed at the time resulted in a hardening in recycler’s attitudes, and many such wastes being treated as hazardous, thereby attracting considerable documentation costs before any sorting, washing, or pre-treatment takes place prior to recycling.

These problems have now been largely overcome as a result of two significant advances. Firstly attitudes have changed in the lab, and technicians and managers are now both more aware and more responsible. Secondly there are now specialist recyclers that have helped to lead that attitude change as environmental concerns continue to focus the minds of the waste producer into establishing new recycling routes. The evolution of that change has been speeded by increases in landfill tax making traditional routes less financially attractive.

The second problem is what is known in the recycling sector as “green-washing”, where companies use green issues as a marketing advantage without any detailed analysis of the environmental impact of the systems they put in place to collect recyclables. The transport miles needed to collect the material often negate the environmental benefit of recycling. The comedienne Ruby Wax best summed this up when she said “I do my bit for the environment: On a Sunday morning I put my wine bottles from the previous night’s dinner party in the boot of my V8 4x4, and drive the 10 miles to the recycling centre to pop them in.”

Optimising vehicle journeys remains at the heart of recycling, not just for environmental reasons, but also for very valid commercial reasons. Most recyclables are high volume and low value, and the value of any materials recovered is quickly eroded by current high fuel costs. The importance of using local providers where they exist is therefore brought into sharp focus. This is simple with obviously uncontaminated materials such as cardboard, where a plethora of regional recyclers exist in the household waste recovery sector. Such recyclers are very keen to gain a valuable commodity from a volume trade producer.

Those items deemed as potentially contaminated are best returned via the supplier. The large laboratory suppliers are now doing a great job in collecting chemical bottles on their delivery vehicles, where recyclables effectively become a return load on an otherwise empty vehicle. Whilst potential contamination, and the exacting demands of modern science probably make it impossible for a return to the days of the “deposit paid” re-usable bottle, collection at the time of delivery clearly results in a significant environmental benefit without additional transport miles.

Despite the obvious advances of recent years, there remain other very recyclable materials that are difficult for the supplier to collect, perhaps because they are delivered by parcel courier, or through a distributor that does not share the environmental enthusiasm of their principles. There are also wastes that are widely used in labs but less so elsewhere, so established recycling routes and systems do not exist, or are less well developed than those that apply to more commonly occurring wastes. Most notable amongst these is the expanded polystyrene (EPS) which is widely used in temperature controlled shippers and UN packaging for winchester bottles. As recyclers get paid by weight for recovered materials, EPS presents its own challenges due to its high volume and low density. What is required is a new approach like that of Labwaste Ltd, who will collect EPS at the time of a hazardous waste collection, and hand-sort from it good quality reusable shippers and winchester packs that are either returned to the supplier for a small fee, or re-marketed to companies shipping temperature controlled products. Whilst on its own, the collection of EPS for compaction and recycling is not viable; collection at the time of other chargeable supply combined with the added value of re-use has ensured the future of this service.

Other materials displaying the same obvious difficulties are the sample bottles used in labs. These are usually manufactured from high quality virgin polymer that is very recyclable, and a valuable commodity once processed. Some of the largest disposers are environmentalists and water authorities that have completely innocuous applications such as water sampling. Again un-compacted volume is a barrier to recyclers but organisations will need to be ever more determined: these types of plastics, whilst inert, do not readily decompose, and will linger in landfill for decades.

A whole new approach should be taken with these lab-specific, high-volume wastes. Scientists in hospitals, universities, and large organisations seldom have any control over the recycling and waste disposal budgets which are often negotiated on a site-wide “total waste management” contract that works superbly for general waste, but leaves the lab floundering when it comes to their own unique needs. Whilst the cost of emptying a skip or wheelie bin is obvious, this often does not come out of the all too frequently over-stretched lab budget. This cost might however make a difference to the financial viability of recycling over landfill, and if at the lab manager’s disposal would enable him or her to negotiate environmentally (and often financially) better disposal routes by dealing with responsible suppliers that will collect recyclables at the time of delivery. This in turn would encourage manufacturers and suppliers to either become licensed themselves to collect and recycle their wastes, or to form associations with specialist recyclers that are both technically competent (to deal with any contamination issues), and able to handle frequent collections of mixed small quantities of a wide range of materials alongside other more lucrative operations such as chemical distribution or hazardous waste disposal.

What is required from the recycler is a deep understanding of diverse laboratory operations, a capability to deal with mixed wastes in small quantity, a fleet of vehicles with nationwide coverage supported by other non-recycling business, and a desire to meet complex recycling needs. A creative approach to reuse such as in the aforementioned EPS recycling is also hugely beneficial

Whilst the balance between the environmental impact of transport miles, and the benefit of recycling is a difficult one, even when it appears that recycling is of little or no benefit, consideration should be given to our dwindling landfill capacity. Some estimates show that in some areas currently licensed available capacity will be exhausted well before the end of the decade. In such areas, whilst appearing at first glance to be a crisis looming, the increasing costs of landfill tax combined with increasing transport miles per tonne will make recycling more cost-competitive, and therefore the disposal method of choice rather than the preserve of those with less restricted budgets.