Eleven years ago, as a Fulbright scholar, Nina Dudnik did a year-long research stint at the Africa Rice Center in Côte d’Ivoire, where her colleagues meticulously rinsed out disposable items, such as pipette tips, so they could re-use them. Soon after, when she went to graduate school at Harvard University, United States, she saw that serviceable equipment and laboratory equipment were routinely thrown out whenever laboratories upgraded their inventories.
Along with a small band of fellow students who had also worked in resource-poor laboratories, Dudnik kept her eyes peeled for discarded equipment such as chromatographs, microscopes, centrifuges and glassware. They soon sent their first shipments to Guatemala and Paraguay.
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