BCRM puts sustainability under the microscope for recycle week

Bristol Centre for Reproductive Medicine (BCRM) is showcasing a longstanding partnership with Bristol charity Children’s Scrapstore, which sees clean, safe laboratory packaging and other suitable materials reused as resources for creativity and play.

For around four years, the clinic has been setting aside materials that are no longer needed in the laboratory but can be safely reused rather than discarded.

The initiative began after BCRM Senior Andrologist and Lead for Andrology Services Karla Turner attended a talk exploring sustainability in fertility treatment and began looking more closely at opportunities to reuse some of the materials passing through the laboratory.

Fertility laboratories depend on specialist equipment and consumables, many of which are necessarily single-use to meet the stringent safety and quality standards required when handling eggs, sperm and embryos.

But alongside those essential clinical requirements, the BCRM team identified a range of clean packaging and other materials that could have a useful second life.

Items suitable for creative reuse have included polystyrene delivery boxes, cold packs, pipette-tip boxes and the colourful rubber bungs and plastic tubes used to package specialist ICSI needles.

One small item can add up to a surprising amount of material. BCRM uses around 2,163 of these 7.5cm plastic tubes every year. 

In 2025 alone, the clinic carried out 742 ICSI procedures, producing 11,130cm of tubing, with a further 5,093cm coming from biopsy cases – a combined 16,223cm, or just over 162 metres. Laid end to end, that's roughly the height of Blackpool Tower.

Karla said: “Patient safety and the quality of our laboratory work will always come first, and that means many specialist items need to be single-use.

“But we started looking more closely at what was coming through the laboratory and realised there were also perfectly safe materials that could be useful to somebody else once we had finished with them.

“Finding a simple way to give those items another purpose seemed like a really positive thing to do.”

Suitable materials are collected by Children’s Scrapstore, a Bristol reuse charity which works with businesses and industry to give unwanted materials a new purpose and make them available as a sustainable resource for creativity and play.

The charity collects and reuses a wide range of surplus materials, by-products and packaging from businesses across the region, diverting around 200 tonnes from landfill each year.

Kate Fowler, CEO at Children’s Scrapstore, said: “Something that has reached the end of its original purpose doesn’t necessarily have to become waste. Materials that businesses no longer need can have a completely different life as a resource for creativity and play.

“Working with organisations like BCRM means we can give these materials another use, while helping businesses identify simple opportunities to reuse resources.”

Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration across healthcare, with organisations looking at practical ways to use resources responsibly while maintaining the highest standards of patient care.

BCRM is using Recycle Week to put the issue under the microscope and highlight one practical example of how small changes behind the scenes can give useful materials another life.

Karla added: “We’re helping people create the next generation, so it feels particularly fitting that we should also be thinking about the environment that generation will inherit.

“There are things we have to use to provide safe, high-quality fertility treatment, but where there are opportunities to reuse materials responsibly, we want to take them.”