Scotland recycles 72,000 contaminated single-use plastic bottles in a world-first move

Scotland is taking a new approach to laboratory plastic waste. A new recycling system has already processed around 72,000 contaminated plastic sample bottles. The technology is now being expanded to Petri dishes and pipette tips. Scottish Water has become the first utility in the world to adopt Envetec Sustainable Technologies' GENERATIONS technology. The system disinfects and shreds selected laboratory plastics on site. The treated material can then be prepared for recycling. Scottish Water's laboratories carry out around three million analytical tests each year. These tests help monitor water quality, protect public health and safeguard the environment. But they also generate large amounts of single-use plastic waste. The new system aims to give some of that difficult-to-recycle material a second life.How Scotland is recycling contaminated plastic bottlesThe technology being used by Scottish Water is called GENERATIONS. It was developed by Envetec Sustainable Technologies to process certain types of laboratory waste on site. The system combines disinfection and shredding in one process. This is important because some laboratory plastics may have been exposed to biological materia...