Using Your Consumables Budget to Meet Lab Sustainability Goals

by Team Polycarbin February 2, 2025

Your laboratory is an essential hub of innovation. It’s also the source of excessive plastic pollution and carbon emissions. Biotech and pharmaceutical industries alone produce over 200 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually, with 40% of these emissions attributable to single-use items like gloves, PPE, and pipette tip boxes.

Historically, these single-use products have fueled a take-make-waste economy, where finite raw materials are extracted, briefly utilized, and discarded—contributing to the growing climate crisis. Polycarbin’s low-carbon lab products change that, offering a practical path to starting your decarbonization journey and directly contributing to your evidence-based sustainability goals.

How Polycarbin's Circular Economy Works

Every product we offer contains 20-100% Closed-Loop ResinT™, and we recycle every product we manufacture through our Closed-Loop platform. Unlike traditional recycling, our process ensures that lab plastics are remanufactured into the same products, preserving their value and reducing the need for virgin materials.

Here’s our process:

Collect and Recycle: Partner labs fill our recycling bins (Carbins) with any brand of lab plastic waste, such as empty tip boxes, tubes, or Petri dishes.
Process into Recycled Resin: These materials are shipped back to us, where we use a proprietary process to create a pure recycled, circular economy resin.
Manufacture New Products: We create new lab products from the recycled resin, ensuring every product contains circular economy resin.

By keeping lab plastics in their original ecosystem, Polycarbin ensures a consistent supply of recycled materials while reducing dependency on virgin resources. This approach increases the number of times materials can be reused, significantly amplifying their environmental benefits.

A circular system for lab plastics can generate over 10 pounds of products for every pound of plastic produced, compared to just 2 pounds through downcycling. This means that every pound of plastic recycled through our system has an exponentially higher environmental payoff than traditional methods, multiplying the positive impact with each cycle. Each additional use cycle compounds the environmental benefits, further minimizing the carbon impact of the original material.

Evidence-Based Sustainability for Tracking & Reporting

By leveraging the Carbin Counter™, labs can seamlessly report their sustainability achievements in grant proposals, compliance audits, and internal reviews—ensuring their efforts are impactful and recognized. With it, you can confidently demonstrate how your purchasing decisions contribute to measurable environmental benefits, helping your lab align with broader sustainability goals.

When you purchase low-carbon lab products from Polycarbin, you’ll see exactly how much crude oil consumption and CO₂ emissions your lab reduces—all displayed in pounds. If you also recycle your consumables with Polycarbin, the Carbin Counter™ dashboard will track CO₂ emissions, water savings, and the total pounds of waste your lab diverts, showcasing the complete impact of closing the loop.

To ensure transparency and accountability, we conduct third-party supply chain audits using ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 compliant Life Cycle Assessments (LCA). These audits are critical to powering our Carbin Counter™ Customer Dashboard and allow us to provide verifiable sustainability metrics.

Making Sustainability Attainable With Customized Solutions

While the Carbin Counter™ empowers labs with measurable impact data, Polycarbin also ensures that labs of all sizes and needs can take meaningful steps toward sustainability through tailored solutions. Whether your lab is ready to recycle, purchase sustainable products, or both, Polycarbin offers tailored solutions that make achieving sustainability both manageable and impactful.

Labs often start by either purchasing recycled consumables or recycling their lab plastic waste with us. Then, they scale their impact over time. If your lab is fully committed to both recycling and purchasing recycled products, you’re closing the loop—a powerful way to maximize your impact.

Ready to Align Your Consumables Budget With Your Mission?

Embedding sustainability into your operations while continuing your critical research can drive meaningful change. Whether you’re just beginning your journey with sustainability or are ready to fully close the loop, we’re here to support your goals.

Join the growing movement of labs transforming waste into innovation. By partnering with Polycarbin, you can align your consumables budget with your mission, embed sustainability into everyday operations, and drive meaningful environmental change.