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The production of plastic bags needs to be curtailed, as bags pollute the planet very heavily, affecting animals in the wild and in the ocean. All waste must be sorted and recycled. https://big-ben.co/areas/

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Thank you very much that there are people who want to popularize garbage collection on our streets. But we have friends in Central London (https://www.rubbishwaste.co.uk/central-london/) in a garbage collection and collection company who want people to do more for their city and planet. They try to keep our streets clean and help clean our homes.

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Great piece! There are monopoly issues throughout the pharmaceutical chain (among others) - they need to be broken up - and IMO, much should be put in the public domain - Phrma cannot be trusted with our health ...

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Thanks Matt. I was hoping you'd do a piece like this. As an end user of laboratory supplies I can see the roll-ups and 'standardization' to a company happen. But it takes an analyst or supply chain person to trace this out.

Rainin makes a very popular low-strain ergonomic manual pipette system (low volume fluid measuring and transferring). It requires non-standard pipette tips (the small pieces of disposable plastic tubes that the fluids are pulled up into and dispensed from). These tips have been hard to come by recently. Tips for particular fluid handling robots have also been hard to come by (they're kind of dedicated to COVID testing I've heard). My lab tried testing out generic tips for an older robot made by the same company and they had issues forming a proper seal.

What happens when you can't use your robot? You do it manually using your scarce manual pipette tips, running out of them even sooner.

What to do? If necessary you can purchase a $1000+ set of manual pipettes from another company that uses tips that are still in stock, but most places aren't going to purchase an entirely new robot just to use tips that are still in stock.

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The prime minister of Canada, a left-leaner eager to please the global elite, has announced he plans to ban all plastic in our country by designating it a toxic material.

Ref: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ottawa-set-to-declare-plastics-as-toxic-substance/

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