Glassware in the Crick's glasswash facility.

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Our glasswash facility keeps the Crick in clean glassware, helping to ensure quality control in our research.

  • 6 industrial dishwashers

  • 20 wash cycles per day

  • 750,000 items of glassware cleaned each year

The glasswash team supports research by cleaning and sterilising glassware, collecting used glassware, restocking each lab's supply and sterilising larger or lab-specific items.

Clean glassware is increasingly important for biomedical research. Rapidly improving technologies and techniques can detect ever-smaller amounts of compounds so contaminated glassware could lead to inaccurate results.

A renewed focus on reproducibility within the research community has driven demand for higher levels of quality control and methodological rigour across all aspects of research, including the reliable elimination of glassware contamination.

Every member of the Crick's glasswash team is responsible for their own group of labs at the Crick. The team can easily walk up to 10,000 steps each day as they collect their labs' dirty glassware and restock clean glassware twice each day.

Glasswash is such a lovely friendly team. When I was working in the labs upstairs I didn’t stop to think about where all the clean glassware came from, but now I realise Glasswash are the most important people in the building.
Tasnim Ali, Apprentice Technician