Solvent and Waste Bottle Setup

[dbussan2000]

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all having a great day! If someone would be willing to share information on how your lab stores the solvents for the mobile and waste containers with me, I would really appreciate it. My goal is to cut down on solvent fume in the laboratory.

Thanks!

[lylegordon]

Solvent bottles are in a flammable cabinet (not ventilated) and waste containers are on the floor below the LC, either with a cap with ports or a loose foil cover. Mobile phase bottles have caps with ports or holes. The lab has sufficient air turnover that we have never noticed solvent vapors with this set up. There are filters for solvent bottles and waste containers (check VICI) that you can use to reduce vapors coming out.

[DylanAnderson]

I have all waste lines leading through small pilot holes drilled into a waste funnel equipped with a solvent leak-free lid. No solvent evaporation and the lid can be flipped to dispose of a bottle of old mobile phase.

[dbussan2000]

Hi Dylan,

Would you be willing to email me photos of your setup. I like the fact that you have no solvent vapors coming out.

Thanks!

[DylanAnderson]

I'm not sure how to upload a picture but yes, if you provide an email address I'll send you a picture of my set-up.

[Arc009]

Hi,

I am also working on this right now. I got the waste container from Justrite, but I found the adapters which they sent me have only a small hole, I wonder whether you can find adapters from 3rd parties, because the adapters from Justrite are not cheap.

Also, I found some of our Agilent (1260) HPLC has a couple of draining tubings with different diameters, I know one is from the column, another from purging, and another thin one from detector. Is this typical for your Agilent HPLC? why are they not using a single line ?

I also like to know how the 3 tubing lines can be connected to the waste container.

Arc

[lmh]

It's quite normal for systems to have loads of different waste tubes. Most people bundle them together and lead them into a single waste pot. This makes sense because if you're not doing anything clever (like recycling solvent) your purge solvent waste is the same stuff as your gradient solvent from the detector outlet, and the autosampler wash solvents will be related and compatible.

The only exception is that if you have a cooled autosampler, it's worth finding out which waste tube is carrying away condensate water. This will just be water, and some systems produce it in pretty large volumes. It's cheaper to dispose of it as water down the sink rather than as specialised solvent waste!

There is also a more obscure exception in prep systems. You might like to keep the final waste from the detector separate here, in a clean container, in case you miss your peak! Some prep systems even come with a multi-way valve diverting waste from successive runs into successive bottles. It feels a lot less embarrassing rotary evaporating the waste from one run to recover your precious sample than it does lugging away a huge container of dirty-looking gunk from the last week and hoping to retrieve a specific peak from it.