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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Science Memes
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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 studied biomedicine in Germany, man the amount of pipet tips we went through just for bullshit experiments. Pipetting water. Playing enzyme with our eyes closed, grabbing loose pipet tips from a table.
Then I met my spouse who was doing a PhD in Russia and had to wash out pipet tips. But ok, at least he wasn't doing biomedical science, just food tech science, maybe that's fine in that field, I told myself.
Then I went to do my international master's degree (in Germany with a lot of foreign students) and I couldn't believe how many people had had to wash out pipet tips.
The other major difference between rich ass university lab and normal lab was whether you would get pipet tips sorted in a plastic container or get a bag of pipet tips and had to put them into a plastic container you would reuse again and again. The former being more expensive and creating much more plastic waste obviously, but also being much faster.
Pipet tips are elitist markers.
Tbf, I remember the times we reused everything, even tubes.
And it was a mess and there is so much evidence that the whole process of reusing is even worse for the environment.
Plastic recycling in the home is basically a scam, but at the scale of a hospital where you're generating large amounts of the same (known) plastic that's going in its own bin, it's much easier to recycle. I just bought a bunch of recycled PET that mostly came from medical waste.
I mean, I've worked at a number of hospitals in the US and never seen a recycling receptacle for our waste. Our waste either goes in a biohazard bag to be incinerated, sharps containers to be disposed of (altho not sure in what way), or a regular trash can to presumably in a landfill.
Not sure if other countries are different, but I can't imagine they sort through our biohazard waste bags for plastic materials.