Tuesday, April 04, 2006

How Money Is Wasted

We got a shipment yesterday, a big package with 9 kilograms of dry ice. Inside this big box was 250 micrograms of 1Kb DNA ladder. We had to dig through 9 kg of dry ice pellet to find this small red/white box.



Ten minutes later, another identical looking box arrived, from the same company, also with 9 kilograms of dry ice. Inside was 1 milliliter of prestained protein markers.



OK, we did order them on two different days last week. But isn't it a good practice to try to consolidate shipments if possible? Both were shipped on last Friday, within one hour, via the same carrier. And 9 kilograms of dry ice? Even though this was over the weekend, it still seems an overkill. Well, at least I found a place for the dry ice. I donated it to the lab where I always steal dry ice from. They were happy to have it to fill their almost empty dry ice chest.

2 comments:

Albatross said...

... and you can use it for icecream!

allegro said...

How? Not that I know of.

But we did use liquid nitrogen to make icecream. Check it out:

http://bell-lab-server.mit.edu/labphotos/funtime/Icecreammaking/index.html

Yum yum.