Ice Packs
Reduce
- Combine ordering with others
- Look for shelf stable alternative products
Reuse
This is time to get creative! Assuming they have not interacted with anything hazardous, try looking around in your local community to see if anyone can reuse ice packs. School, vets, sports centers. Atheletic departments and dance studios/academies often love ice packs to sooth sore muscles or injuries.
Check with your organization’s shipping department. They might need them to keep items cool during shipping or as samples are waiting to be collected. You can also check with local shipping companies/stores.
Just make sure you adhere to health and safety requirements. Make sure your ice packs are clean, not leaking and preferably without any labeling that says they were for scientific materials.
Recycle/Disposal
Supplier Take Back Programs:
2bscientific.com - takes back their ice-packs and recycles them
New England Biolabs - Their own packaging, including ice packs and styrofoam boxes. Each box comes with a FreePost label to send it back
Ask the supplier what are your ice packs made of? Most solid plastic ice packs are made with mainly water + alcohol/salt/ppg. Demand that they use/develop, non hazardous, biodegradable, environmental friendly benign formulas.
There are some small ice pack recycling schemes around. If nothing, then lastly, dispose of properly. Make sure you open them and let the gel dry out before putting it in the garbage. The volume will significantly decrease as it dries.
Polystyrene Containers
Reduce
- Combine ordering with others
- Look for shelf stable alternative products
Reuse
This is another area to get creative. Try looking around in your local community to see if anyone can reuse styrofoam boxes. Check with your organization’s shipping department. They might need them to keep items cool during shipping or as samples are waiting to be collected. You can also check with local shipping companies/stores. Try startup companies in the area.
Again, just make sure you adhere to health and safety requirements. Preferably, your coolers will be without any labeling that says they were for scientific materials.
Recycle
Supplier Take Back Programs:
New England Biolabs - Their own packaging, including ice packs and styrofoam boxes. Each box comes with a FreePost label to send it back
Promega Package Return: “All boxes have a pre-paid address label that can be used to post the polystyrene boxes back to Promega for recycling.” UK Only
Boline Meridian Bioscience - takes back their polystyrene shipping boxes
Insight Biotechnology - takes back their polystyrene shipping boxes
Waste Matters - A company based in Clara, Ireland that takes all those polystyrene boxes in the back of your lab and creates ‘plastic logs’ that are shipped out to other companies for use.
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