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Today, Greater Boston is the nation’s largest hub for biotechnical innovation, and a new start-up focused on discarded plastic from the region’s many cutting edge labs has released initial results from its pilot with environmental services giant Veolia. Last year, Veolia and MassBio completed an agreement with GreenLabs Recycling to support innovative regionally focused solution for recycling container lab plastics used in facilities that manage medical waste.

Previously, the U.S. sent much of its plastic waste to China to be recycled. However, in 2019, China ended the imports of the world’s waste, freezing a huge market for plastic waste. This created a huge issue for Massachusetts labs and bio start-ups given the work they do driving innovation in Kendall Square and beyond.

Veolia’s partnership with GreenLabs provides a solution to that problem, creating a hyperlocal recycling and manufacturing ecosystem for lab plastic consumables, recycling pipette tip boxes into a lab product they manufacture outside of Boston called a tips transfer bin. Scientists use these bins so they can 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. The lab plastics are separated, granulated, and prepared for the 100-percent 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. Once he developed the idea, founder Sam White connected with MassBio, which connected GreenLabs with Veolia.

Under the agreement with Veolia, the recycling solution for lab plastics was put in place, using the medical waste processing center that Veolia operates in Middleton to aggregate the plastic for GreenLabs. After a year-long 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.

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