The Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health continues to be a sustainability leader at UBC through its Glove Recycling Program. Recently, the Centre shipped off two more pallets of disposable gloves for recycling – weighing 584 kg, which is approximately 195,000 gloves! These gloves were collected over the last 18 months from all participating labs in the DMCBH and will be turned into new plastic products such as lawn furniture.
The initiative has been spearheaded by members in Dr. Kiran Soma’s lab – Melody Salehzadeh (recent PhD graduate), Michelle Jung (PhD candidate), Brittany Docolas (MSc student), Anna Mazurenko (Research Assistant) and Bella Yang, Emma Lam and Alexanne Hall (Undergraduate Research Assistants).
“Through this initiative, we hope to spark conversations around waste reduction in labs and motivate the recycling of new materials,” says Melody.
Since starting the glove recycling initiative in October 2021, the Centre has collected over 730 kg of disposable gloves, which equates to approximately 245,000 gloves that have been diverted from the landfill. In an exciting new development, the team of students helping run the DMCBH Glove Recycling Program recently received an award through the UBC Student Environment Centre to fund lab plastic recycling for unmarked plastics such as pipette tips, falcon tubes and petri dishes. Stay tuned for more details!
