TD: In a nutshell, it’s education. People need to know what the pitfalls and common failings are. Greenwashing often has a negative connotation and people feel they’re being misled; often it's innocence or a naïve misunderstanding of the relevant points.

Take recycling polypropylene, for example. Most pipette tip racks are made from polypropylene, which is a grade five resin. The international resin scale goes from one to seven, with one being almost universally recyclable and seven being virtually non-recyclable. Polypropylene is at the wrong end of the scale – it requires specialist recycling, so if it goes in your general plastic waste stream it's more than likely going to be diverted to either landfill or thermal energy recovery, so that’s one innocent mistake.

For the plastic we do need to use in the racks, we can use PET. This is a grade-one resin that is almost universally recyclable and goes in any mixed recycling stream, so you can be confident that it will be recycled. It also has a higher value on the aftermarket because PET recycling is an even and regular process in which the polymer is cleaved one molecule at a time, resulting in a recyclate with the same properties as virgin PET, so you can make the same product and recycle it up to 10 times. This stops the flow of new oil into the product cycle and cuts it off at the product manufacturing stage. In this way, naivety or lack of education about recycling plastics can often lead people to do the wrong thing or not act effectively. There's nothing deliberate, we just need education.