Chromatography Forum

I'd just like to do a quick informal survey. What are you/your company permitted to dispose down the sink drains? U.S. responders only. My company is leaning towards NOTHING down the drain; methinks they'd really like us to dilute even distilled water with tap water before disposing it down the drain. Even ethanol, which every bar and restaurant disposes down the drain, or stuff that goes down the drain all the time at your home like consumer products, is on the company's tentative bad list. Any suggestions? It would be a real time-consumer to do everything as "hazardous waste". How do people deal with liquid retained in a syringe filter after using, like in a Whatman Autovial? One cannot know how much can be pushed through the filter in advance, and pulling out the plunger causes liquid to go flying around.

I worked for a while in a biochemical research lab.

Nothing went down the drain. Everything--solvents, samples AND the test tubes, etc, containing them--went into a five gallon bucket. When the bucket was full, we hammered a lid on it and put it in the hall.

From there it went off to some magical Hazardous Waste Disposal Land.

It really wasn't that bothersome.

I've heard so many things second hand around my building over the years. I was actually doing a contamination study (PET pellets + chloroform, toluene, cyclohexylbenzene, benzophenone, etc.) and asked the head Eviornmental, Heath & Safety guy what to do to clean up my collanders and plastic buckets. He said go ahead and rinse them with water down the drain. I guess where I am there is (or was) some type of limit on bad stuff going down the drain as a percentage of total waste. I can't remember if it was 1% or less, but I was pretty shocked.

We usually dump ACN, EtOH, MeOH, Acetone down the drain in limited quantities...maybe less than 10L/day for my department (~150 people).

But, I recall a recent e-mail where "things are going to change" and "the solution to pollution is not dilution." So, even inorganic acids should not be diluted and dumped. I wonder what I am supposed to do with my old, flat soda

If you go to the EPA website you can see what limits are permitted in industrial wastewater. Ethanol for instance, is 10 ppm. In a lab the wastewater may never be monitored, but I guess we must beware of the potential.

We put our organic solvent in separate drums for halogenated and non-halogenated waste. The reason for that is when the waste is burned they have to use scrubbers for the halogens so they don't destroy more of the ozone layer.

Nothing here too. Or near to nothing as makes no difference! Rinse with acetone, rinse with water into waste winchesters then rinse with water again and that can go down the sink if your feeling really daring! So hopefully nothing.

By the way, I'm in pharmaceutical R&D analysis, so our rinse waste is fairly small.

As we are a manufacturing site we have our own waste treatment plant. All of our waste is treated down to the allowable discharge levels and then pumped into a river estuary. The waste aqueous stream from the labs is combined with that from the manufacturing plants and the the whole lot is eaten by bugs in the biotreatment plant. We do not put water immicible solvents down the drain in the labs due to the smell and flammability hazard and generally polar solvents used for analysis go for very expensive incineration anyway.
We test the waste streams for residual levels and have always been well below the allowable limits.

GCguy

I worked for a waste disposal site (Last day today ) and we either recovered solvents or incinerated them (halogenated and non-halogenated separate) or land fills.

in my last job (where the company made biocides), we had very strict environmental laws and had to report everything we emitted to the atmosphere and also had to strictly check out trade effluent. Guess what? The company decided to move the process to Brazil and India (Cheap Labour and less Environmental Laws!!!)

Good to know that....