Medical advances should not take place at the cost of environment!
Thousands of clinical trials are being conducted around the world and many of them utilize the laboratory services of contract research organizations (CROs) such as Quintiles, Covance, PPD, ICON, to name but a few, for independent laboratory testing. Specific laboratory kits are provided by these laboratories that are usually made for particular visits and are intended to be user-friendly with everything prepared, whether they are to be used or not. These kits usually include blood collection tubes and aliquot tubes, blood collection sets, and transfer pipettes and specimen transport bags. There is an expiry date on a kit indicating the expiry date of the blood collection tube that will expire first among all.
Indeed, not all tubes will expire together and the other tubes/pipettes/bags essentially will not expire. However, when replacement is requested, there is no option to replace just the items needed to be replaced. They give you a brand new kit with everything prepared.
I once requested kits from Covance with all items except collection tubes removed and the immediate reply was "These items cannot be removed. If these items are not needed please dispose of them". The kits had not even been assembled then!!
The company's inflexibility and reluctance were utterly disappointing!! Disposing of things is easy, but resources that can otherwise be put to good use are wasted for no reason, not to mention the burden imposed on landfills and environment (they are mostly plastics). They need not be rubbish in the first place!!
WASTES COULD BE PREVENTED BEFORE THEY ARE CREATED. DO NOT PUT CONVENIENCE BEFORE THE ENVIRONMENT.
These CROs should rethink their social responsibility objectives immediately. Please sign and share this petition!
