By Marie Launay, PhD student at McGill University

During my first days preparing genetic libraries for my PhD project, I was struck by the amount of single-use plastic I was generating, including pipette tips, tubes, and gloves. All this plastic would fill an overflowing trash bin by the end of the first day in the lab. As a PhD student in fish ecology, it felt wrong, and particularly paradoxical: I am working for Arctic ocean conservation but I’m producing so much plastic waste! 

With my lab mate Anthony Gagliano, we first decided to quantify the waste we were producing. To do so, we set aside all plastic waste generated during our first batch of 96 genetic libraries from start to end. That single batch itself produced 7.57kg of plastic waste!

Plastic waste generated from extraction to library of 96 samples

We realized the scale of the issue at that moment, and we decided to reduce our impact as much as possible. We started with simple steps: reusing pipette tip boxes after autoclaving by buying tips in refill bags and loading them ourselves, choosing consumables with less packaging when possible, and even creating cleaning protocols for DNA shearing tubes. These efforts almost halved our plastic waste! 

But the real game-changer arrived later. Our supervisor bought a pipette cleaning robot. This robot can decontaminate tips for up to 10 reuses. I’m not going to lie; it takes extra time to load the tips and organize the whole process. But it really makes a change!

High-level science and sustainable practices should go hand in hand. So, if you’re a researcher or a student, start exploring simple ways to reduce your plastic waste in the lab. Every small step counts! For readers interested in more detailed data, the full commentary is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00500-w

About the author:

Marie Launay is a PhD student in fish ecology at McGill University’s Macdonald Campus, where she is a member of the Fish Population and Conservation Genomics Laboratory. Her research focuses on the Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida), investigating the population structure of the species using lcWGR.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marie-launay-4b4019123/