LabCycle, a UK start-up co-founded by University of Bath alumna Dr Helen Liang, has successfully commissioned the UK’s first pilot plant for recycling plastic lab waste.
With support from the University of Bath, LabCycle has set up a pilot recycling plant in a converted greenhouse on campus where it is developing its recycling technology. The team has established collaborations with the private, public, and government sectors, including the local National Health System (NHS) Blood and Transplant unit to recycle waste from their laboratories.
Liang told Sustainable Plastics that LabCycle's recycling technology involves a 'combination of chemical disinfection and mechanical treatment, to remove biological and chemical contaminants', after which the material undergoes mechanical recycling. She revealed in an interview with the University of Bath that the process been developed according to the standards of the NHS, and the health and safety protocols from different research institutes.
The patent-pending technology reportedly doesn’t require waste to be autoclaved before entering the recycling process, resulting in less heat energy use. Water can purportedly also be reused during the process, minimising its use. The method has received the stamp of approval from the University of Bath’s Innovation Centre for Applied Sustainable Technologies (iCAST), which has tested the properties of recycled polystyrene (PS), polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and shown that the polymers are suitable to make new lab consumables.
Currently, less than 1% of lab plastic waste is recycled in the United Kingdom, with researchers using significant amount of single-use plastic in their daily research to avoid cross-contamination between experiments. LabCycle intends to recycle up to 60% of this waste, including pipette tips, test tubes, petri dishes, and multi-well plates, to produce high-grade plastic pellets. The start-up collaborates with an undisclosed partner that manufactures the pellets into new lab equipment.
Following a successful pilot project recycling single-use plastic waste from three labs at the University of Bath in 2022, LabCycle is working to roll out the service commercially. The start-up has secured around GBP 430,000 in funding to develop and commercialise its technology.
“Adopting a circular economy approach involves optimising laboratory practices to minimise waste generation and resource consumption,” Dr Liang noted in a statement. “Research and healthcare workers can focus on reducing and reusing single-use plastic items when possible. Additionally, proper waste segregation should be emphasised to enable recycling,” she concluded.
*This article was updated on 15/09/2023 to include a statement from Dr. Helen Liang.