Autoclaving plastic fly vial waste

[kschulze]

I wanted to get some feedback from other users of plastic fly vials - does the BioSafety Committee at your institute require that you autoclave the vials prior to disposal? This is something that they have recently implemented at our school after 20 years of tossing them in the regular garbage. Their argument is, as genetically modified organisms, they pose a danger to the public. We fought them on this, and had a meeting and they said, heaven forbid if channel 2 news would do an expose on the school and take pictures of our dumpster (they actually brought photos to the meeting to demonstrate) with broken plastic vials with mutant flies escaping. Such a travesty must be prevented. They said this was a common practice anyway that was required by the NIH, EPA etc. which may very well be, I don't know.

I just wanted to find out from others what you think of this, setting aside the fact that plastic vials are already environmentally unfriendly it seems to me a waste of energy, both manpower and autoclave power to autoclave them yet too for such a trivial thing.

[KHibbard]

Having you given any thought to freezing the vials. We freeze them for about 6-8hours then throw them out in the regular trash. This ensures that all flies and larvae are dead. It's at least a little less troublesome than autoclaving.