Waste & Environmental Impact ReductionReagent waste
When dealing with aged chemical inventory, the choice is between polluting and wasting money, or potentially wasting far more money through replication issues. What if there was no need for that choice?
- With Revo
- Without Revo
With LabMinds owning the chemicals until consumption and knowing everything about them, optimization is possible to a point with negligible waste.
Worst case is using a chemical that had gone bad and not realizing it until months later.
Best case is throwing out chemical that was paid for, and quite possibly paying more money to dispose of it to avoid the environmental impact that highly concentrated and pure chemicals can all too easily have.
Solution waste
Almost everyone makes stock solutions. You reduce solution preparation time and guarantee reasonable replicability, but you probably will have to throw some away. Or do you?
- With Revo
- Without Revo
What if you need 4.8L but only have 1L bottles of a 10x solution available? Revo can easily calculate the recipe requirements for precisely the amount that’s needed. For instance, ordering 1600 mL on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday or scheduling 960 mL solutions for 5 mornings in a row dramatically reduces waste.
What if you need 4.8L but only have 1L bottles of a 10x solution available? This stock is likely the best option. Despite the chemical waste, 52% overhead for most chemicals is worth the time saved and consistency compared to repeatedly making smaller 1x batches by hand.
Solution waste
Reading about plastic straws being banned can be jarring for people in laboratories, given how much plastic waste laboratories produce. However, hygiene and safety are important, and plastic consumables are typically a necessity.
The Revo is a step in the right direction. Where you might have used a pair of gloves, 2-3 weighing boats, and a pipette manually preparing a solution, you will use none of them with the Revo as it has no single-use consumables in the whole system.
Solution purchasing
While buying buffer or media solutions can be tempting, it’s important to realize that what is typically being shipped contains less than 1% of the active ingredients. Surely this waste isn’t necessary?
- With Revo
- Without Revo
You never have to buy solutions with Revo.
Ordering solutions – particularly if the operation is not in a life sciences hub – has an atrocious carbon footprint, and such long shipments will create major quality concerns as well.
Even the shortest of shipments can result in major quality problems if the outside environment is, for example, particularly warm. It’s practically impossible for the preparing party to guarantee that the solution will not sit in a dark-colored delivery van in direct sunlight for hours on end.
General waste
Weighing boats, latex gloves, pipettes and filters – solution preparation creates considerable plastic waste for every solution made. But does it have to?
- With Revo
- Without Revo
We have reduced the amount of single use items to a minimum (just filters)
It’s not difficult to imagine a thorough laboratory scientist generating 10 or more items of miscellaneous waste during the preparation of every single solution.
Reduction of thoroughness will be good for nature, but it does not sound like a good thing for the research.
Did you know?
When shipping a 10mM solution, over 99.5% of the mass is either glass or water.
Regulations
The regulatory oversight of chemicals continues to increase. But do you need to care?
- With Revo
- Without Revo
By tracking inventory throughout the process, generating reports on controlled chemicals is straightforward and can be done with confidence.
A chemical inventory management system is essentially mandatory if you use controlled substances. The system itself is of little value without strict processes that ensure thorough and accurate record-keeping, which requires further time and resources.