Q and A with Polycarbin - The Closed-Loop Lab Plastic system sweeping Life science
COUNTERacting the SPIRALING PLASTIC DEPENDENCY in lab work
If one sustainability conundrum vexes biologists, it is the environmental consequences of single-use plastic waste generated by laboratory work. This plastic is practically indispensable in modern laboratories - the lifeblood of day-to-day analyses due to its dependable sterility and relatively low costs. But then there’s the rub. At the same time that we are producing tons of this waste, life science research is sounding the alarm on the ecotoxicity and food web impacts of plastic pollution. Microplastics have accumulated to the point that they are detected in both terrestrial and aquatic plants and animals. Further, fossil fuel-based manufacturing and the disposal of plastics contribute to air pollution. This unsettling contradiction is driving demand for an improved model for laboratory work.
Today’s post features an interview with Noah Pyles from Polycarbin. Noah was a physician-scientist in training at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine along with his co-founder, James O’Brien when they launched Polycarbin in 2019. The company offers the first suite of comprehensive solutions for recycling single-use, lab-grade plastics, as well as a Closed-Loop Collection of lab consumables remanufactured with recycled plastic.
A CONVERSATION WITH NOAH PYLES, POLYCARBIN CO-FOUNDER
1. What is the sustainability issue that Polycarbin addresses, and how do you do it?
We target the largest source of hidden emissions from laboratories, the single-use plastics consumed daily. This is an issue that I'm passionate about because the magnitude of waste and emissions attributable to the life science industry is more staggering than you might think at first.
It's not just about end-of-life disposal. There is a tremendous amount of energy associated with the production of virgin polymers that go into these products. One fact that I didn't know until about a year ago, is that it can take up to 110 megajoules of energy to produce just one kilogram of polypropylene plastic. That's five times the energy required to make a kilogram of steel. So, it's not just that this material ends up in our environment taking 500 to 1000 years to decay. Virgin lab plastics require a tremendous amount of energy to make, and by nature, embody a tremendous amount of fossil fuels.
Polycarbin diverts plastic from landfill and from incinerators. We process it into performance feedstocks that we can use to remanufacture laboratory products. And in effect, we reduce the demand for virgin plastics in the market by up to 92%. On top of that, by circularizing this material, we are ultimately able to reduce water consumption by 85% and total CO2 emissions by as much as 90% per kilogram of plastic as shown in our recent third-party LCA.
2. What types of life science labs use Polycarbin?
Our predominant customers are biotech, biopharma, and academic research institutions - but we have been shocked by the ubiquity of these plastic products. They are everywhere. We have many customers in food tech, ag tech, food and beverage, QC laboratories, and environmental research organizations. Almost wherever some sort of testing is going on right now, there are enormous quantities of nonhazardous, noninfectious plastic waste streams that are being landfilled. It’s an even more pervasive issue than I thought about when I was working for seven years as a scientist in labs. This material is everywhere, and everyone is looking for a better solution to manage it.
Polycarbin collection bins in use by the Genome Biology Research Department at New England Biolabs.
3. Are there features that set Polycarbin apart from typical laboratory recycling initiatives?
Polycarbin is a circular solution for laboratory consumers. We're producing lab products that are made from the same lab waste materials we receive. Virtually everyone else in the market who takes in this material is participating in a form of downcycling, which I don't say disparagingly because there are important purposes for downcycling in many markets. The difference here is that this material is extremely high-quality plastic, it's scientific and often medical-grade plastic that can be used in a higher-end product than something like a park bench that can’t be recycled again and for which there is not as much demand as there is waste. We need to make sure that we are putting it in an endpoint that is its highest-use form so that it can be reused time and time again. That is the best way to preserve its value and minimize its environmental impact.
Beyond that, Polycarbin’s most important feature is how we track this supply chain using what we call our Carbin Counter. When we built this company, we knew there was a negative stigma associated with recycling. We knew a lot of that came from the fact that often you don’t know where the collected material ends up or even if it’s actually recycled. In effect, you had to wonder if recycling was more sustainable than incineration or landfill.
We built our entire system around software that audits the carbon emissions associated with each step along our circular supply chain. We feed that data directly back to our customers with the Carbin Counter creating true supply chain transparency. That way customers can measure how much plastic they recycled and what that carbon impact means for them and the planet. Furthermore, our data platform measures the amount of fossil fuels that are supplanted in the market through the buying of our circular economy products (1.4 kg of crude oil equivalents per kg of Polycarbin products purchased). In effect, by tracking and reporting our supply chain from benchtop to benchtop, we have created a data platform that rewards our customers for choosing to recycle and procure more sustainable products with metrics that can be used in sustainability reports and certifications. That is probably the most important distinguishing factor for us versus pretty much any other sustainability platform on the market for this industry.
4. I noticed on your website that you translate reported carbon savings into numbers of trees. I think that will appeal to many biologists who might not be familiar with carbon footprint calculators.
Right? Carbon equivalencies are important because not all of us can think in terms of megajoules, or really imagine what a metric ton of carbon looks like. How can you picture that? So translating these units into values that are visualizable is helpful.
Along these lines, there is something special about our customers being able to hold the physical embodiment of circularity in the form of one of our lab products. When you’re holding a Polycarbin rack, you're holding something that is anywhere between 65 and 92% circular economy resin - and you know exactly what that means in terms of carbon emission reduction, so that's pretty special.
5. Are your customers able to incorporate the data generated from the Carbin Counter into their own carbon footprint calculations?
That’s probably the most important next phase of growth for our company. We just completed a third-party ‘Life Cycle Assessment” (LCA) that audited our California supply chain. The results were staggering. We were able to reduce emissions by 90%, reduce water consumption by 85% and supplant 1.4 kg of crude oil equivalents per kg of products compared to the average industry incumbent. We want to use this verification process to allow our customers to simply plug our data into their corporate sustainability reports and goals. Eventually, we want to work with states to have this data qualify our customers for landfill diversion credits, plastic recycling credits, and for a state like California, possibly monetize the metric tons of CO2 emission equivalents they reduced by partnering with Polycarbin. We want our data platform to be a set-it-and-forget-it solution for hitting science-based waste and emissions targets.
6. Why take on single-use plastics in the context of multiple sustainability issues?
What truly merits discussion is that this is the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to reducing carbon footprints. It's kind of a double-edged sword for life science to be so reliant on high-throughput automated assays that require a tremendous amount of single-use plastics. These waste streams have big environmental impacts yet also represent a massive decarbonization opportunity.
I also want to make a kind of shameless plug here as well. The hypothesis of our company is that as a society we are headed toward a revaluation of landfill diversion, plastic recycling, and most importantly, carbon emission reduction data. We think the earlier our customers can quantify this in a verifiable way, the better positioned they will be to qualify for future tax credits that reduce the total cost of sustainability. We think we can help them do that through this data.
7. Can you briefly describe the recycling schemes that you offer now?
There are several tiers, and they all have funny names related to organic chemistry. We offer an Alpha Carbin service, a Beta Carbin service, a Gamma Carbin service, and our Delta program.
The Alpha Carbin gives customers the opportunity to recycle the most wasteful product in the laboratory, which is a pipette tip rack. It's a brick of polypropylene that in most instances is not being recycled. The Alpha Carbin program is available across the contiguous United States, as well as certain provinces in Canada. And we're looking to expand that as we go. It requires virtually no learning curve since there's no separation or sorting phase. It’s very easy for labs to adopt this program.
With our Beta carbon service, you get two different collection containers, one for clear items and one for colored items. When you give us clear plastics, you're actually sending us a mixture of Polystyrene, #6, and Polypropylene #5. That's your tissue culture plates, your serological pipettes, your tips, your Petri dishes, centrifuge tubes, etc. Since there is such a big difference in the density of these two polymers our technology is able to separate the materials into over 98% pure streams that we can use for re-manufacturing.
Our new Gamma Carbin program was launched in response to customers coming to us saying, hey, we'd really like for you to be able to recycle disposable gloves. Can you look into it? We spent about six months investigating to find an endpoint for the nitrile to supplant concrete cement. It’s downcycling for another use instead of landfilling. It is not the circular solution that we are still looking for, but the carbon intensity of manufacturing cement makes it very worthwhile. That carbon saving is evident on the platform.
Lastly, we offer a ‘white glove’ service to customers in California, New England, and parts of the mid-Atlantic where Polycarbin does all the onsite training, onboarding, and logistics for transporting and processing materials. This service is currently only operational in areas where we have a physical presence, but we are looking to expand our Delta platform over the next 12-24 months. This is the most cost-effective way to partner with Polycarbin and usually creates the largest environmental benefit.
8. Let me ask you about contamination scenarios. If a scientist has used a conical tube in a BL1 or BL2 lab, can they then rinse it with a bleach solution to qualify for your recycling collections? Do you require cotton plugs to be pulled out of serological pipettes? What about filtered pipette tips?
Every state has slightly different regulations surrounding regulated waste streams, and beyond that, some account practices are dependent upon the comfort level of EH&S staff on-site. In our preliminary meetings with our customers, we usually meet with the EH&S team to target the low-hanging fruit when it comes to low-risk, high-impact workflows. I have yet to work with a customer that hasn’t found an area of their lab where they could make a minimal change and create a massive impact. The key is not letting ‘perfect be the enemy of the better’. Start small, develop buy-in from the scientists, and then expand from there.
As for the specific types of non-regulated contamination you mentioned, both cotton plugs and filtered pipette tips are not a problem for us. We developed a patented sorting methodology that is trained on rigid plastics. We can remove pipette tip filters, cotton, labels, markers, filter membranes, etc….
9. How difficult is it for a scientist in the laboratory to separate plastic waste using your systems? There isn’t a polymer number for recycling on every lab supply, obviously.
We provide a simple training protocol. Conveniently, laboratory plastics are remarkably consistent across all suppliers. About four types of plastic make up approximately 95% of the plastics in laboratories. We go after three of them, #2 high-density polypropylene, #5 polypropylene, and #6 polystyrene. Once scientists associate these plastic types with specific lab products, sorting is easy. In other words, when somebody knows what the 96 well plates are made of, they know that for every permutation of a 96 well format. This is also good because scientists use several different supplier brands.
Any lab plastic involving freezing or heating something up is going to be polypropylene. Anything that's containing an organic solvent will most often be HDPE. Any item that's clear, that looks like a CD case, that’s polystyrene. These assumptions are learned through our training protocol.
Really, when you work with Polycarbin at scale, you’re going to have a whole training program available to you. Our goal at Polycarbin has been to produce a scalable solution. We’re really fortunate that the community we serve is super enthusiastic. It’s just a testament to the pent-up demand. Our customers have been dying for a more sustainable way to do science. They're pretty willing to adopt a new kind of behavior in the laboratory to make their work less carbon-intensive.
10. How is Polycarbin able to process so much plastic from so many organizations?
A part of our supply chain interfaces with the larger recycling infrastructure in each geographic region we operate in a hub and spoke model. This means west coast plastic gets processed on the West Coast and East Coast plastic is processed on the east coast. Most of the partners we work with are outfitted for large-scale, post-industrial, or post-consumer plastics meaning they are managing tens of millions of lbs. of material a year. While we are moving a large amount of rigid lab plastics, we are not inhibiting their workflow.
Densifying our material is critical to reducing emissions in transportation and making our system cost-effective. Otherwise, for example, a 50 ml conical tube would be shipping mostly air by volume - a huge waste of transport capacity. What we do if you're in New England, we densify in New England. If you're in Research Triangle Park, we densify in RTP. If you're in Northern California, we densify in Northern California, etc. That allows us to move plastic from a density of about 12,000 lbs per 53-foot truck bed to on average 35,000 pounds per truckload. This means the amount of CO2 emitted per ton mile is reduced by almost three-fold.
Then, we work with other processors for the remanufacturing phase, for example in California, the plastic we collect and process never leaves the state. There are some customers whose total supply chain for their plastic is less than I think 280 miles, which is crazy, that probably doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
11. Why should scientists consider using your circularized plastic lab supplies?
Because scientists shouldn’t have to choose between innovation and the environment. Because each Polycarbin pipette tip case you purchase keeps 26 kg of crude oil equivalents underground and out of our atmosphere. Because a circular economy is a more cost-effective solution than continuing to burn and bury our problems.
12. How can scientists be sure Polycarbin tubes and plates are safe to use for highly sensitive techniques?
We've conducted numerous tests on our resin to confirm that there are no carryover contaminations. All our manufacturers are ISO 9001 certified. They undergo the exact same certifications as every other brand does to enter this space. Probably 20% of the existing inventory on most of our customers’ shelves is produced at the same manufacturing site by the same manufacturer that we currently use, so we're not reinventing the wheel here.
13. So it's an exciting time for laboratory sustainability in terms of innovative solutions, but also a precarious time for biotech start-ups and perhaps even biopharma in terms of investment. What’s the key value life science organizations derive from using Polycarbin?
Fundamentally, our customers save costs on carbon. Our customers are saving 10 to 20% by buying our remanufactured lab plastic products. Cost savings in product procurement subsidizes or sometimes even completely offsets the cost of recycling.
Here are two important statistics. Biopharma and biotech are responsible for conservatively 200 megatons of CO2 emission equivalents every single year, and that's 55% more than the automotive industry per dollar spent. In addition to that, 40% of the emissions coming from the laboratory are attributed to procured goods and services, most of which are single-use plastics.
Keep in mind there are costs to digging carbon out of the ground, refining it, molding it, and shipping it out to be used once, and then of course burning it. Our customers save on the total cost and the carbon emissions associated with lab consumables. It’s a no-brainer.
14. Why should the individual scientist care?
I can only answer that question based on my experience as a former scientist and from my perspective, which is largely the reason I founded this company with James.
When I realized that all of my failed experiments were being buried in a landfill right next to the same community of people I was caring for while rotating in the clinic, I realized it wasn’t just the scientific community that deserves a better way to work. Rather, the scientific community has a moral responsibility to find a more sustainable solution for this mountain of single-use scientific plastics and stop burying it in someone else’s backyard. It made me realize that despite what everyone tells you, plastic isn’t cheap. The costs are just hidden and often incurred by someone else. That has to change.