Dangers of chemical storage plastic containers

I do quite a lot of chemical process like electroforming, chemical etching and polishing, electroplating in wide range of metals, vapour deposition and so on. In fact I do have a small chemistry lab next to the shop where I do the work and store the chemicals - more than 200 bottles and jars of various sizes containing liquids and solids. Many of those chemicals are used only infrequently, for example iridium plating materials. In the past just about all the chemicals were sold in glass containers (sometimes coated on the outside in plastic to prevent breakage) but the trend in the last decades is for plastic containers, mostly polyethylene. In fact one hardy sees glass at all.
When recently looking for Copper Sulfate I have noticed that container is brittle and cracked. Investigating other plastic containers I found six cracked and some materials leaking. Needless to say all the glass is fine. The fact is that plastic will deteriorate and the sale of volatile liquids in plastic is almost criminal because of the permeability of plastics. We are so used to accept the fact that adhesives will harden and other materials evaporate, that nobody complains about it. In the past solvents were sold in metal containers but now this is not the case either. I do usually transfer those to glass or metal and will have to do it now with the rest of my chemicals.
If you have long term storage materials in plastic containers in the shop I suggest transferring those to metal or glass. Scooping a few pounds of spilled potassium cyanide powder is no fun...

Glass rules! I'm also not a fan of those 5 gallon square plastic bottles that come in a cardboard box. The bottoms get damaged and then you have an oil spill.

UV exposure?

IMHO the flawed logic is what you buy it in is suitable for long term storage. Product is generally sold in retail packing, that does not mean it can stay in it for decades.

I don't like the plastic containers for chemicals,either. I once had a need for a mall amount of pool acid, which was 30% HCL. I bought a gallon of the stuff, which was the smallest that I could get at the time. I used the amount I needed and then stored it in a cabinet with some metal items. Even though there were no leaks in the plastic jug, the metal was developing surface rust.

I put it outside of my shop and eventually disposed of it at a recycling station nearby.

SteveBausch said:

UV exposure?

Click to expand...

Or other chemicals inadvertently transmitted to packaging via hands or vapor?

billzweig said:

I do quite a lot of chemical process like electroforming, chemical etching and polishing, electroplating in wide range of metals, vapour deposition and so on. In fact I do have a small chemistry lab next to the shop where I do the work and store the chemicals - more than 200 bottles and jars of various sizes containing liquids and solids. Many of those chemicals are used only infrequently, for example iridium plating materials. In the past just about all the chemicals were sold in glass containers (sometimes coated on the outside in plastic to prevent breakage) but the trend in the last decades is for plastic containers, mostly polyethylene. In fact one hardy sees glass at all.
When recently looking for Copper Sulfate I have noticed that container is brittle and cracked. Investigating other plastic containers I found six cracked and some materials leaking. Needless to say all the glass is fine. The fact is that plastic will deteriorate and the sale of volatile liquids in plastic is almost criminal because of the permeability of plastics. We are so used to accept the fact that adhesives will harden and other materials evaporate, that nobody complains about it. In the past solvents were sold in metal containers but now this is not the case either. I do usually transfer those to glass or metal and will have to do it now with the rest of my chemicals.
If you have long term storage materials in plastic containers in the shop I suggest transferring those to metal or glass. Scooping a few pounds of spilled potassium cyanide powder is no fun...

View attachment 242115

Click to expand...

"Criminal negligence" it may be indeed, Bill.

The permabilty of the material was known and published before it was ever formed into the first commercial product. It has remained in the description of the characteristics ever since.

Folks who make the decisions as to what to package their product in grew LAZY, and rather a long time ago, in assuming that it won't BE there long enough to matter, as LPE does do the job better than most other plastics.

My suggestion may seem contrarian, but it is to glove up, mask-up, and one by one, scarier ones first, place each of those at-risk containers into ... believe it or not - a larger, but same again "for now" poly container. "Intact" AND NOT decanted.

Buys time as a first line of defence while you sort a better long-term plan. One that is going to prove a "non trivial exercise" to finish the implementation of, I am sure.

Bluntly? You are traveling with far too much legacy "edge case need" baggage and it cannot HELP but go over-age-in-grade, and by decades, not just years.

20CW

SteveBausch said:

UV exposure?

Click to expand...

All my chemicals are stored in cabinets and separated according to type; acid with acids, etc. As for keeping the products a long time - yes, I would not keep a a container of milk for years, but expensive materials that are seldom used and in small quantities are stored for decades. Palladium chloride (for palladium electroplating) is now about $4000.00 for a 100g (about 3oz) container. You do not expect me to throw away the unused portion after a few years.
In general the trend in the packaging is no different than the trend in products in general: Not to be kept or repaired, just throw away. Not long ago my auto-darkening welding helmet have failed. The electronic module is sealed with the battery inaccessible inside. Just throw away the whole thing and buy a new one.

billzweig said:

You do not expect me to throw away the unused portion after a few years.

Click to expand...

"Throw" away, no. "Trade" away or "recycle" away back to some sort of refiner if "use-up away" is not probable.

Many of the industries as even USED these technologies ceased to do a long time ago, and will never return. Palladium? Telco's used to depend heavily on it for gross-motion switches. Then space-division went to weird switches, frequency division, time division, cell relay and packet. Switches are no longer covering several whole walls of a building. They are on the power supply of a box with fiber optic "patch cords" that replaces that whole building and two more like it.

The money tied up is not recoverable ANYWAY if all it does is become some other poor soul's expensive to sort HAZMAT nightmare in the fullness of time.

The chemicals are not the only player in the room gone past "sell by" date. Update your valuation landmarks before someone who knoweth not has to do for with BFBI methods.

billzweig said:

Not long ago my auto-darkening welding helmet have failed. The electronic module is sealed with the battery inaccessible inside. Just throw away the whole thing and buy a new one.

Click to expand...

Chicargo Electric welding helmet battery replacement - YouTube

And....

Harbor Freight auto darkening helmet repair - YouTube

And....

Harbor Freight auto darkening helmet repair - YouTube

What are the screw on caps for the glass jars made from besides metal that rusts? Some kind of hard plastic back in the day a real cork, wax or what.
Bill D

Bill D said:

What are the screw on caps for the glass jars made from besides metal that rusts? Some kind of hard plastic back in the day a real cork, wax or what.
Bill D

Click to expand...

Best of them were glass on glass, ground mating surfaces, wire bail. I'm also old enough to remember ceramics, also with a bail, zinc screw-on with red rubber gaskets, natural cork, and what I now suppose was Neoprene or a cousin to it.

Hydrofluoric acid was once in lead or wax coated something wherein the wax was of course fully halogenated, thus stable.

Storage advice was listed right alongside the rest of the information on USP,Technical, or Reagent grades of"whatever" in a CRC handbook or the like.

May still be. I haven't had the need of it much since teaching of IED's to folk who were in a line of work who might have THAT need. Halogens. Curious critters, those can be.

thermite said:

"Throw" away, no. "Trade" away or "recycle" away back to some sort of refiner if "use-up away" is not probable.

Click to expand...

It greatly depends on the shop doing the work. Some that make a lot of R&D parts like to have small quantities of materials on hand so they can do development work quickly and inexpensively. Also some chemicals were made by companies that either changed their formulation or went out of business so shops can be reluctant to throw them out as they know they cant get more.

This is not an excuse for hording of defective chemicals. If something has been proven to have gone bad have it deposed of immediately. Otherwise it be used again...

alextnnr said:

It greatly depends on the shop doing the work. Some that make a lot of R&D parts like to have small quantities of materials on hand so they can do development work quickly and inexpensively. Also some chemicals were made by companies that either changed their formulation or went out of business so shops can be reluctant to throw them out as they know they cant get more.

This is not an excuse for hording of defective chemicals. If something has been proven to have gone bad have it deposed of immediately. Otherwise it be used again...

Click to expand...

It is not even an "excuse" for the hoarding of chemicals, in general. They don't ARRIVE in dangerous condition. The GROW INTO that status. No further spend required, and even less effort.

I once found a certain IRONY on "assuming command" of a Manufacturing operation that my new shop manager wanted to order MORE Cyanide eggs when we had already inherited easily a 20 year supply, and "Oh BTW" - we did the math - enough to cause Rockville, MD to NO LONGER represent the second largest concentration of his own ethnicity outside of New York City!

Some things it is cheaper to have to buy fresh "now and then" than to stand the risk 24 X 7 365 X (too damned many years).

Most of my work is R&D in medical and nuclear medicine field. In both cases any product or process developed and once approved cannot deviate from the submitted and approved description. It is not unusual to take ten or even twenty years to get FDA approval while the work on the process or product continues. On number of occasions I've returned to the project to do a small change after years on inactivity on my part. Currently, for example, I am working on a medical radioisotope production system that includes a thick platinum plating on one of the components. I have been working on this (on and off) for the last five or six years with test runs, changes in procedure and configurations with each change and test documented and approved (in this case by Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission). I certainly cannot dispose of the diamminedi-nitrito-platinum solution every time I leave the project. Another project (not using chemicals , but involving a lot of precision machining)is finally in the human trials stage after 11 years of development and animal trials and will be still years before approval - if at all. So it is not always a simple question of not cleaning up or being a hoarder.

The longevity of plastic depends a lot on the general type of plastic, and the sub-type of plastic, and maybe the process used to make it.

My father (chemist for 3M, now retired) has had a particular polyethylene container since at least 1950. It is essentially as good as it was the day it was made, and it gets handled nearly every day. It is NOT like polyethylene that you would get these days. He keeps an antifungal dissolved in alcohol in it for treating shoes and the like.

Plastics vary, and the worst among them are the ones that need a more volatile "plasticiser", They fairly rapidly lose that material, and then crack.

Last month I had a bottle of sulfuric acid on a shelf and when I went to pick it up the whole bottom of the plastic bottle fell off. I had a new pair of pants on that are now shorts since the acid ate the bottom of the legs off. A hell of a mess to clean up also.

billzweig said:

Most of my work is R&D in medical and nuclear medicine field. In both cases any product or process developed and once approved cannot deviate from the submitted and approved description. It is not unusual to take ten or even twenty years to get FDA approval while the work on the process or product continues. On number of occasions I've returned to the project to do a small change after years on inactivity on my part. Currently, for example, I am working on a medical radioisotope production system that includes a thick platinum plating on one of the components. I have been working on this (on and off) for the last five or six years with test runs, changes in procedure and configurations with each change and test documented and approved (in this case by Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission). I certainly cannot dispose of the diamminedi-nitrito-platinum solution every time I leave the project. Another project (not using chemicals , but involving a lot of precision machining)is finally in the human trials stage after 11 years of development and animal trials and will be still years before approval - if at all. So it is not always a simple question of not cleaning up or being a hoarder.

Click to expand...

It actually IS as simple as that. That sort of decision making is not meant to be in the hands of Scientists or Engineers at all.

Managers, their Accountants and Corporate counsel would price the safe acquisition,incoming QC, safe storage, periodic inspection and "vetting", recycling/disposal AND ALSO the acquisition of fresh material AND seeing to it that it ALSO met the specs right into the burdened fees for each of those many years apart episodes, and "regardless". Twenty weeks just as ruthlessly as 20 years.

One must keep the materials "current", safely packaged and stored, never hazardous nor "stale" the whole time, even if that requires the spend for ongoing recycling, vetting, and repackaging of your OWN holdings, losses and cost of top-up to be expected.

Just as crucially, maintaining clear sight of the historical "all inclusive" contribution margins which can thence be calculated accurately going into each new episode's bid. ELSE "no bid".

The offsetting advantages are reduced liability, lower storage and handling costs, and a more nimble and up-to-date organization.

AND NOT a museum, least of all a museum "on call". if you cannot afford to do those things as they should be done? Stand aside. Let someone else try. Find another venue. Do it better next time.

Your description is as if The Peninsula, Kowloon, The Mandarin Oriental, the Conrad, JW Marriot, or The Island Shangri La, Admiralty tried to remain the world's most revered of eateries off the back of 20 year old leftovers so their prices could be a few dollars lower and the menus of 20 years earlier were meant to remain viable until the end of time.

They do not and will never.

Providing the best and freshest as can be had, and charging what they must for it is a major part of why they are famous rather than notorious.

Customer cannot bear those costs? Find ones who can and will. Else change direction or even the name over your own door.

3M tried mining. Twice, IIRC.

Then they did other things they could succeed at. The rest became history.

Union Carbide & Carbon started out a clear winner.

Then they became careless first, a different kind of history, next, then a mere subsidiary. See Bhopal, India.