How to Achieve Sustainable Manual Pipetting
In our modern era, sustainability is a crucial concept, and it extends beyond environmental care to optimizing human resources and workflows. In life sciences, labs are adopting eco-friendly practices, reducing waste, and prioritizing resource efficiency. New laboratories focus on minimizing environmental impact through waste reduction and energy conservation.
Digital products and liquid handlers play an important role in achieving sustainability objectives by streamlining manual pipetting workflows and simplifying tasks, helping labs reach their goals efficiently.
How can you enhance the sustainability of manual pipetting?
Manual pipetting, a prevalent practice in laboratories, is often a nuisance for personnel, regardless of whether they use manual or electronic pipettes. Factors like fatigue, distractions, and limited experience can result in errors, potentially compromising experiment precision and reproducibility.
Moreover, pipetting is a time-intensive task that demands concentration over an extended duration. These aspects not only impact productivity but also escalate material consumption, as errors may necessitate experiment repetition or even the disposal of valuable samples.
Accurate and efficient manual pipetting leads to substantial cost savings for laboratories while contributing to environmental sustainability through the reduction of waste.
Additionally, it conserves energy and reduces the use of single-use plastics commonly associated with manual pipetting workflows. Simultaneously, it promotes standardization and reproducibility, guaranteeing dependable results and heightened data quality across experiments.
In summary, precise pipetting supports sustainability through:
- Minimized error occurrence
- Reduced chemical usage
- Diminished plastic disposal
- Time savings for lab personnel
- Heightened work efficiency
It’s important to emphasize that gaining experience and adhering to best practices can significantly enhance your proficiency in manual pipetting. I encourage you to explore this blog post, “12 Tips to Improve Your Pipetting Technique,” for further resources to learn about proper pipetting techniques, covering aspects such as pipette calibration and selecting the appropriate pipette tip.
Manual pipetting brings about two undesired factors: the constant need for human resources and the potential for human error. This is what drives the development of pipetting tools.
To improve the sustainability of pipetting and sample preparation, some pipetting tools offer semi-automated pipetting processes to streamline molecular and cell biology workflows. This leads to a reduction in material and human resource consumption and contributes to sustainable practices in the long term.
Did you know you can calculate your potential lab savings using a unique digital tool? Have a look at this interactive web calculator and discover how much you can save.
