Veolia, MassBio partner with GreenLabs Recycling for medical waste plastics recycling

Last year, Veolia and MassBio completed an agreement with GreenLabs Recycling to support innovative regionally focused solutions for recycling container lab plastics used in facilities that manage medical waste in Greater Boston. 

According to the companies, the partnership provides a solution for these discarded plastics, creating a hyperlocal recycling and manufacturing ecosystem for lab plastic consumables. For example, the companies recycle pipette tip boxes into a lab product they manufacture outside Boston called a tips transfer bin. Scientists use these bins to see what their plastic is being turned into every time they deposit their used tips into these benchtop bins made from 100 percent recycled plastic. 

The lab plastics designated for GreenLabs recycling from Veolia customers are shipped from the location of the waste generator to Veolia’s Middleton facility, where the plastics are consolidated to ship to GreenLabs’ recycling facility in Concord. 

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The lab plastics are separated, granulated and prepared for the recycled plastic molding process. The granulated plastic material is then transformed into the transfer bins using their molds at a nearby plastic molding facility, keeping the circular economy solution hyperlocal and within a 50-mile radius of one of the world’s largest life science hubs. 

GreenLabs founder Sam White developed the idea, which led him to connect with MassBio and Veolia. Under the agreement with Veolia, the recycling solution for lab plastics was implemented, using the medical waste processing center that Veolia operates in Middleton to aggregate the plastic for GreenLabs. 

After a yearlong pilot initiation, the partnership has evolved to the point that GreenLabs has diverted more than 200,000 pounds of plastic that would have otherwise gone to a landfill, with some large biotech firms already taking part by contributing containers for recycling.