Lab Consumables Manufacturing: Pipette Tips and ABB Robots

Lab consumables manufacturing is one of the quietest high volume jobs in industry. Every lab that moves a few microlitres of liquid throws away a small plastic cone afterward, so the factories that make them run around the clock. Each tip has to be clean, straight and the same as the last one. This post follows the story from Julius Petri's glass dish of 1887 to molded pipette tips and dishes, looks at what the October 2026 news says about tips and racks, and explains where ABB robots could fit in the factories that make them.

Sample tubes and pipette tips in racks on a lab bench. Photo: Gannu03 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Petri's glass dish to disposable plastic

Julius Richard Petri was an assistant in Robert Koch's Berlin laboratory, and in 1887 he published "A minor modification of the plating technique of Koch." His change was a close fitting lid that kept airborne germs off the culture. Priority is disputed, since Emanuel Klein described a nearly identical dish in 1885 and Percy Frankland a covered dish in 1886. These dishes were glass, so every one was washed and sterilized by hand before the next experiment.

Participants of a bacteriology course in Berlin, circa 1888, the years Petri's dish came into use. Photo: unknown / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Pipettes had the same hand made character. A micro-pipette Joseph Lister used in his souring milk experiments, now held by the Science Museum in London, is a glass tube drawn to a fine point. The Royal College of Pathologists notes that as recently as the 1970s the tips of pipettes were glass, and many were made by the user as needed. A modern micropipette began in 1957, when Heinrich Schnitger at the University of Marburg built a prototype with a spring loaded piston and refillable plastic tips, and patented it the same year. Warren Gilson and Henry Lardy at the University of Wisconsin later added adjustable volumes.

A glass micro-pipette Joseph Lister used in his souring milk experiments. Photo: Science Museum, London / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Single use plastic changed what a lab had to do. Greiner Bio-One says it began making the first single use polystyrene Petri dish in Nürtingen, Germany, in 1963, though a British firm, Sterilin, imported plastic dishes from Sweden around 1960. That is a company claim and the two sources disagree. Either way, the shift is clear. Washing and sterilizing glass gave way to buying sealed plastic by the sleeve, and a whole industry grew up to mold it at scale. Dishes and tips became products with catalog numbers, sold in sealed packs that a lab could trust without testing.

Micropipettes with yellow plungers in a bench rack, the kind that take disposable tips. Photo: Alyssa LaGrange / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

What molded tips and racks look like in 2026

Making a tip is an injection molding job on a large scale. At Fakuma 2023, Sumitomo (SHI) Demag, Hekuma and Schöttli showed a pipette tip cell with a 32 cavity mold and a 4.5 second cycle, which works out to roughly 25,000 tips an hour from one mold. Husky's Fakuma 2024 demonstration used molds with up to 64 cavities, robotic part removal and cycle times at or below five seconds. Husky exhibited again at Fakuma from October 12 to 16, 2026, and lists pipette tips among its medical applications.

An Arburg Allrounder injection molding machine at a trade show, 2026. Photo: Bricetofly / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The rack around the tip matters as much as the tip. On October 12, 2026, Select Science reported that INTEGRA launched ACT Ecolabel certified AUTO rack GRIPTIPS for its benchtop liquid handling systems. The refillable racks are reported to use 43 percent less plastic than INTEGRA's earlier 6000 Series racks, and empty racks stack to halve the space in recycling containers. The tips come in 12.5, 125, 300 and 1,250 microlitre sizes. A liquid handling robot depends on racks that sit in exactly the same place every time.

An automated pipetting system at work with a deck of tip racks and sample plates. Photo: Pzucchel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB does not make pipette tips, and we found no ABB project in this particular product. Its robots are well known in molding plants, though. In a Spanish plant an ABB IRB 4400 unloads parts from an ENGEL injection molding machine, and the same cell packs the molded parts into cases on a pallet. We cover the wider job in our post on ABB robots in injection molding. A tip line would ask for much faster picking and cleaner handling, so the fit is a possibility, not a product.

An ABB IRB 4400 unloads parts from an ENGEL injection molding machine in a Spanish plant. Photo: ABB

Cleanliness is where the ABB range gets more interesting. The IRB 1300 comes in a Clean Room version, and ABB says the IRB 1200 meets ISO class 3 for particle emission. Arms like these could load racks, move filled trays to packing and keep people away from open product. A high speed IRB 360 FlexPicker could handle sleeves or trays downstream. Again, this is how existing ABB robots could fit and not a reported installation. Cleanroom molding and packing follow the same logic as in pharmaceutical filling.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

Where lab consumables go next

Labs are moving from hand pipetting to automated workstations, and that raises the standard for the consumables. A racked tip must pick up cleanly, and a rack must fit a robot gripper, which pushes factories toward tighter tolerances and more inspection. ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge shows how robots may soon move between benches. Our post on hospital lab automation follows that side of the story, where the tips end up in use. Dishes, tubes and tips all follow the same rule: the more a lab automates, the more it needs consumables that never vary.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge. Photo: ABB

The open problems are mostly about plastic. Factories want less of it per rack and more recycled content, as the INTEGRA launch shows, while labs want sterile, uniform tips. Cost sits in the mold and the speed of the cell. Skills are needed to tune molds and robots together, and fast arms near operators need guarding. Teams planning a new cell usually build and test it first in RobotStudio, which avoids stopping a running mold just to try a new rack layout.

An automated colony picker moves a pin over a plate of bacterial growth. Photo: András Pásztor / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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