These former Pitt Med students designed a lab plastic recycling system

The scientific community creates an estimated 12 billion pounds of plastic waste annually.

Thanks to a company founded by two former Pitt Med students, Pitt labs are at the forefront of a new way to reduce their carbon emissions, landfill waste and single-stream recycling contamination — by returning used scientific plastics to the lab in a closed-loop recycling system.

James O’Brien and Noah Pyles discovered the limitations of recycling infrastructure as students five years ago in the Physician Scientist Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

“Because everything in the laboratory is single-use and made of these fossil fuel-derived plastics, every time a scientist chooses to buy a plastic product, it confers a carbon impact to our industry,” O’Brien said.

Often, labs don’t have a choice. Squeezed by budgets and grant cycles, they buy what they can afford.

“So, you basically have this very difficult juxtaposition in which scientists are working to innovate on behalf of human health while their supply chain is completely rooted in the carbon-intensive fossil fuel industry, conferring quite a burden on some of our most disadvantaged communities from a public health perspective,” O’Brien explained.

A growing number of Pitt labs and offices have committed to advancing sustainability. Still, Assistant Director of Sustainability Samantha Chan said she and her team have collected feedback from designated Green Labs over the years that “participants were really upset with the amount of waste they were producing … but there isn’t a budget or funding for [offsetting] that.”

[Read more: The Green Labs program is making Pitt facilities more sustainable.]

O’Brien and Pyles knew scientists wanted better. Feeling a moral imperative, they left med school in 2019 to create a closed-loop recycling solution specifically for the life sciences and health care ecosystem.

In the ultimate circular move, their company, Polycarbin, is returning to the University to help offset its carbon footprint and stay on track to meet its sustainability goals, one of which is reducing landfill waste by 25% by 2030. Even better, the partnership means Pitt labs don’t have to pay shipping costs to participate in Polycarbin’s take-back program, unlike many manufacturers’ similar programs.

Within a month of announcing the Pipette Tip Box Recycling Pilot, 43 labs across the Pittsburgh campus signed on to participate. “I got so many emails,” said Chan, who worked with Polycarbin to bring the program to Pitt.

“Scientists want to know that what they’re doing is making an impact,” O’Brien said. Increasingly, that means having quantitative data. “The health science ecosystem functions on evidence-based medicine, so we operate on evidence-based sustainability.”

The company developed the Carbin Counter, a data tool that measures the impact of customers’ carbon emission reduction, freshwater savings and crude oil supplantation from the market, telling customers exactly how much their work contributes to a circular economy.

“We believe that the inflection point for our industry is right around the corner, where it’s not going to be about qualitative platitudes” and greenwashing, or marketing that makes something seem eco-friendly, said Pyles. “I think the scientific community could be the vanguard of this movement for climate conscious consumers.”

Pyles and O’Brien have been looking for ways to give back to Pitt for introducing them to each other and playing a hand in Polycarbin’s success. Pyles credited Physician Scientist Training Program director Richard Steinman and administrator Blair Douglass “for teaching James and me basically that the status quo, or the conventional wisdom, is always worthy of being challenged. Without rigorous academic training in the life sciences, we would not have been able to do this. We would have just listened to everyone when they said it wasn’t possible,” said Pyles. He added, “Our company doesn’t exist without the Samantha Chans of the world. She’s been an awesome advocate.”

Chan believes the future of Green Labs is bright. She points to an effort by researchers nationwide asking funding organizations like the NIH to add sustainability allocation lines to their grants so labs can move toward reusable models. O’Brien agrees: “We’re living in this interesting time now where institutions like Pitt have an opportunity to lead on this front. In the future it may be a prerequisite.”

For O’Brien, returning to med school at some point is not out of the question. “We’ve been working closely with Pitt’s School of Medicine to define a pathway for that,” he said. “They’ve been unbelievably supportive of our work here.”

In the meantime, he and Pyles are excited to see institutions like Pitt living out a mission consistent with their values. “Because that next Pitt Med student may go on with their MD/PhD degree to found a new novel biologic. And you want them thinking about sustainability in the laboratory in addition to whatever other great work that they’re doing.”

Learn how your lab can participate in the pilot.

— Micaela Corn, image courtesy of Polycarbin