Five essential supplies for your laboratory in 2025

At the start of a new year, it is common practise for businesses and organisations to reflect on what they need to ensure a successful 12 months ahead. Scientific laboratories do not have to be an exception to this. In fact, taking stock of what supplies will be needed in the coming months is an essential part of project management, budget control and simply running an efficient and effective operation.

 

Here are our top five suggestions for essential supplies that your scientific laboratory will find it difficult, if not impossible to function without in 2025.

 

• Safety supplies

Clearly, the most effective laboratory is a safe one, which has everything in place to protect those who work in it and use the equipment it contains. While there are some very obvious safety priorities in terms of goggles, gloves, protective lab coats and other items of PPE, there are many other ways to keep everyone safe with a few sensible purchases. For example, choosing robust, sizable sharps bins that are fit for purpose and easy to use and dispose of once full can help keep prevent needle injuries and significantly lower contamination risks. Likewise, sweetie jars designed to contain dirty cotton wool, swabs and other used waste products help keep a clear division between safe, sterile supplies and contaminated items requiring specialist disposal.

 

• Collecting equipment

Laboratories rely on having effective, clear, hygienic and safe ways to collect and store the samples, chemicals and results of experiments that scientific teams have been working on. As with so many aspects of the scientific and healthcare sectors, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution for collecting samples etc. Therefore, having access to a range of plastic and glass containers, bottles, vials, bottles and jars is essential. Laboratories should ensure they are well stocked with standard specimen containers, as well as histology jars, sampling bottles, urine containers and disposable glass bottles to cover as wide a range of scenarios as possible. These should also all be leakproof, hygienic, aseptically produced and CE marked for quality.

 

• Reliable labelling solutions

Busy laboratories handle multiple samples and chemical products every day and these must be kept safe to avoid spoiling experiments, contaminating samples and ruining test results. Sometimes, these samples and chemicals need to be transferred between two or more laboratories, making their safe and secure storage even more important. Scientific laboratories must establish a clear and easy-to-use labelling system to ensure that all workers know which sample or chemical is which at all times. Coloured caps and plug caps designed to fit snugly over sample tubes and bottles offer one easy solution. Pre-printed warning tapes can be added to provide clear, unequivocal signage for pathological specimens, infectious samples and fragile contents.

 

• Postage and transportation options

Likewise, the packaging materials selected to transfer laboratory samples must be durable, easy to post, compatible with all relevant industry safety standards and, above all, practical and quick to use. A suitable option for this task includes plastic mailing tubes, made from clear, tough plastic and filled with absorbent material to capture spillages en route. They should be large enough to carry their required contents safely, but also compact enough to travel via the mail with no issues, and fit through standard letter boxes to avoid having to be specially delivered, as this could delay processing of important scientific or medical results.

 

• Tubes, trays and tips

The little things count for a lot in a busy laboratory where having the right supplies to hand can make all the difference to the success of an experiment or the speed of returning key medical results. By paying attention to more basic supplies such as test tubes, pipette tips and microtitration trays, a laboratory’s staff can keep the wheels turning on multiple key scientific endeavours all at once. As well as test tubes and vials, keeping a good stock of blood collection tubes and capillary tubes helps keep samples moving through the system, as does purchasing plenty of pipettes, petri dishes and microbiological loops and spreaders, ready to use when needed. It’s all very well investing in fancy, large pieces of laboratory equipment, but there must also be room in the budget and inventory list for the basics.