A UK company plans to set up the country’s first pilot plant for recycling plastics laboratory waste, according to the University of Bath, which said the firm was co-founded by one of its graduates.

LabCycle (https://labcycle.org) expects to reclaim up to 60% of waste and process the resulting material back into lab products, according to the university. It noted that the firm hopes the mechanical reclaim technology could be scaled up to recycle waste from healthcare, research, and commercial labs that is currently incinerated or sent to landfills.

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To avoid cross-contamination between experiments, most lab scientists use a significant amount of single-use plastics in daily research, including pipette tips, test tubes, petri dishes, and multi-well plates. Currently, less than 1% of this waste is being recycled, the university said.

It noted that the start-up company aims to turn the majority of the waste into resin that can be used to make new tubes and petri dishes.

The recycling process requires no autoclave for sterilising waste beforehand, so less heat energy is needed, the university explained. It added that following a successful pilot project that recycled single-use plastics waste from three university labs in 2022, the team is working to roll out the service commercially.