Walk into any life sciences lab, and you’re bound to see beakers or other containers filled with discarded pipette tips on each bench top. Between tips, tubes, and plates, research runs on single-use plastic. Recent plastics price spikes, manufacturing shortages, and supply-chain disruptions have hobbled labs, and COVID testing and treatment research have amplified need for these items. For example, a lab technician might use ten pipette tips to run one coronavirus test, between handling the sample, the test reagents, and setting up the PCR reaction.
All that plastic adds up—even pipette tips, which are typically each no bigger than a pen cap. In 2015, a trio of bioscience researchers surveyed their department at the University of Exeter to create an estimate of the total plastic waste generated by the world’s biological, medical, and agricultural research labs. They calculated that global lab research generates around 5.5 million tons of plastic waste a year–enough material to make over 100 million recycled-plastic park benches. Ali Safavi quickly noticed this deluge of plastic waste while working as a lab engineer. He saw labs constantly buying and using a huge volume of pipette tips, and with no reliable and cost-effective way to reuse or recycle them they just ended up in the landfill after one use. “I discovered that there is a hole in the laboratory consumables market,” Safavi says. “It’s a linear, not cyclical model. It’s not sustainable and it won’t last forever.”
In 2014 Safavi founded Grenova, a biotechnology company based in Richmond, Virginia that makes pipette tip washing machines. Their flagship device TipNovus sits on a bench top and works a bit like a kitchen dishwasher. Users load racks of used tips into the machine and input a customizable wash cycle; then, using Grenova’s proprietary cleaning solution, the machine washes, sanitizes, and dries up to 24 tip racks an hour. Effluent from each wash cycle can be sanitized under UV light in the machine then disposed down the drain, while any runoff containing radioactive material can be collected in a vessel attached to the washer and treated separately according to a lab or institution’s protocol.
Today, Grenova’s washers are used in labs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and in others across government, academia, and industry. Tips sanitized by the machine have been tested and validated for use in techniques like mass spectrometry and ELISA, as well as in COVID-19 PCR testing, and the company says some customers report reusing them up to 25 times.
After their final use the company suggests users wash tips one last time to remove any lingering contaminants and to then recycle them. But labs can’t just toss washed tips right into the recycling bin; they must first check in with their institution’s waste management service and ask if they will take clean tips, confirming that they accept the specific plastic they are made of. This can be an arduous process and isn’t possible for all labs, so many will still have to trash tips after several washes and uses. Grenova says they hope to someday achieve the cyclical model envisioned by Safavi, in which users return their tips to designated recycling programs or back the manufacturer after their last wash.
In a ten-minute cleaning cycle, the Tipnovus generates about 109 grams of CO2, while conventional disposal of a 96-count rack of pipette tips generates an estimated 1.8 kilograms of CO2. According to Grenova, 1,201,932,255 pipette tips have been washed and reused thanks to their products, cutting a total of 4,581 metric tons of carbon emissions and 2,650,848 pounds of plastic waste from the environment.
Labs can reap other benefits from tip washing beyond “going green.” Grenova estimates its devices have saved its customers a total of $84,135,258. One CDC lab that studies carcinogens in tobacco estimates normally spending about $48,000 a year on tips. They cut that bill in half with Grenova’s washer, reporting savings of around $24,000 per year by washing and reusing tips used for solvent transfer in liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry 10 times.
Looking beyond the pipette tip, Grenova recently released a microwell plate cleaner called Purus to enable the reuse of 96-well plates. It’s “one more step forward for those in the life sciences community who are serious about eliminating needless plastic waste while cutting lab costs and improving supply chain resilience,” Safavi says.