How To Dispose Of Laboratory Equipment

Proper maintenance of a laboratory is vital to get a safe workplace and prevent safety hazards for the people handling or using the equipment. Since you can treat the lab’s old equipment in a typical way, knowing how to dispose of laboratory equipment is a crucial skill.

In addition, the used lab needs to be decontaminated thoroughly before disposal or release. Read on, to understand the safe and efficient way to decontaminate and dispose of lab waste properly, as well as misleading methods that you can’t utilize.

How You Can’t Dispose of Laboratory Equipment

When you are planning the disposal of equipment in a lab, you may be willing to throw it out into a dumpster, sell it in an auction, or look for a specialized recycling company. But the question is—are any of these methods safe or possible?

You desire to dispose of regular equipment like computers, spectrophotometers, and particle counters instead of contaminated hardware or radioactive. Let’s understand the consequences of these potential ways:

Throwing Out in a Dumpster

Though it isn’t illegal to dump old lab equipment, it’ll bring some negative impacts. Dumping discarded lab electronics in a landfill can cause the buildup of a condensed methane-generating biodome environment, which is the worst type of greenhouse gas. And it can contribute to global warming massively.

Though many people believe that old lab disposal equipment can be incinerated and converted into electricity, it’s not an excellent idea. The reason is that incineration plants can produce mercury and sulfur dioxide even if they have good air scrubbers.

Reselling

Since dumping isn’t a good idea, you may be willing to resell the old equipment of your laboratory. Though it may seem like a great idea to get extra money while getting the job done, your old equipment will stop working. Hence, it’s not a long-term solution.

Technically, reselling old used lab equipment to someone means passing the disposal of lab waste job to other people. In addition, selling old lab electronics shifts them to poorer businesses that don’t maintain disposal laws. However, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t resell your lab equipment. Instead, find a shop that follows disposal law to ensure proper recycling of the hardware.

Contacting a Recycling Company

If you want to dispose of your unwanted laboratory equipment in the right way, you must have them recycled. In this case, you can follow two different ways to recycle your pharmaceutical equipment, instruments, hardware, and furniture.

Firstly, you can chuck the old used equipment into a big shredder. Shredders can effectively cut everything into chips. Though it’s a practical method, it can’t separate a fair amount of waste. Hence the waste can reach the landfill and cause unwanted side effects. The second method is de-manufacturing.

In general, de-manufacturing includes manually taking the equipment apart and sorting them. And then you can contact a lab equipment disposal company to complete the job.

In this case, Newtech Recycling can be your dependable solution. They have an expert team to sort the plastic from rubber and glass from metals. They also strip down and take the materials apart from complex machinery even within minutes. Though it’s a bit pricy process, it ensures the best level of reclamation, the least pollution, and helps get a more sustainable future.

Newtech Recycling also provides next-day pickups, full accountability, and security-tracked disposal.

How to Dispose of Laboratory Equipment

You’ll have to do a few things to properly dispose of laboratory equipment that is used with biohazardous materials. The disposal instructions are:

• Wear proper PPE or at least safety glasses or gloves.

• Remove the whole samples or lab materials.

• Remove whole biohazard stickers or labels from the equipment’s surface.

• Clean the equipment’s surface for any radioactive contamination. In this case, you can also talk to a health physicist to make the equipment free from residual radioactive contamination.

• Spray an EPA-registered disinfectant on your old laboratory equipment to clean its surface safely. At a time, use a freshly prepared bleach solution maintaining a 1:10 ratio to disinfect biological agents.

• Leave the equipment for half an hour.

• Remove the disinfectant from your equipment completely by rinsing the surface.

• Spray 70% ethanol on the types of equipment.

• Place all the cleaning waste in a biohazard bag and handle it as biohazardous waste.

• Dispose of your protective equipment properly and wash your hands carefully.

Note: Don’t open the equipment’s internal compartments for decontamination. If equipment’s internal compartments are contaminated with biohazardous material, tag them as potentially biohazardous. Inform the Biosafety Manager to decide whether the equipment is safe for disposal or not.

When your old lab equipment is ready for disposal, prepare a certificate with the letterhead of your department addressed to the Director of Surplus Property and Material Management, mentioning that you’ve decontaminated these laboratory equipment designated for removal in agreement with instructions from biosafety. You won’t have to send a copy to EH&S or the Biosafety Manager.

Final Words

Laboratory-used equipment isn’t the same type of waste that a house or office produces. So these old lab equipment take extra care and safe processes to dispose of to avoid harming nature and creations. Once you’ve understood the proper disposal of old lab equipment, hope you can now handle those sensitive electronics safely and properly.

But if your lab produces large amounts of used or damaged equipment regularly, it’s better to take the aid of a lab equipment disposal company. Lastly, remember equipment that isn’t in a lab setting doesn’t need decontamination.

FAQs