Cleaning up my ferrofluid waste

while working on my ferrofluid project I generated a lot of waste and a lot of dirty glassware so what I wanted to do here was show how I dealt with the waste and how I cleaned everything between each attempt in terms of waste the major source was from all the water that I used for the reaction itself and in the washings from a typical larger scale rod like the one I covered in the video this was the water-based waste that I was usually left with the three beakers from the left all contained the original reaction mixture and the one on the right contained the water washings when I originally filled all these beakers there was a lot of magnetite floating around but after a couple days it had all sank to the bottom some of it also ended up oxidizing which was why it kind of turned to brown I then just took each beaker and with the help of a magnet I poured the water down the drain in order to pour something down the drain it's really important to first be sure that there's nothing harmful in it so you really have to know what's in there and then it's not bad for the environment or Wildlife or even just the pipes in this water it was all leftover reactants and side products from the reaction the major components should be ammonium chloride and ammonium Olli ate soap but there also might be some alayich acid and maybe some trace amounts of iron all of these are safe and the solution was already neutralized in the process so it was perfectly fine to dump it for me though this was a pretty rare occurrence being some pretty much never able to pour anything down the drain so even though it was perfectly fine here it still felt a bit wrong to do but anyway after that being done in each beaker I was left with a small amount of magnetite I then used a small amount of water to combine it all into just one now at this point I was actually pretty much done and the magnetite could have just been thrown into the garbage however like with all my cleanup videos I got a bit curious about something the oleic acid coating has a tendency to oxidize and I wondered what would happen if I added some 3% peroxide to it so I added the peroxide and it slowly started bubbling because the iron was catalytically breaking it down into water and oxygen I let it sit like this for an hour and it was definitely clumping up a lot more however it really didn't end up being as interesting as I hoped it might be so when I got bored of it I pulled it out with a magnet and I poured the peroxide solution down the drain then I poured in some more water to get rid of the bubbles I think the peroxide definitely did something to it and it probably caused some of the leftover nanoparticles to aggregate however overall it was probably pretty pointless finally though this was everything I recovered and I could now just chuck it into the garbage the second liter source of waste was from all the alcohol washings in the future I'm gonna try to use way less and I think that it's actually possible to use less than a third of what I used for this one in the end though the amount that I used here still wasn't that bad because it's very easy to recycle I just let it sit for a while and I waited for all the iron to settle out and then I dumped it off into another container this alcohol still has a lot of room to pick up water and excess oleic acid so it can be used for future washes when it does eventually get full of either of these though I can easily just distill it when it was still mixed with alcohol I found that it was annoying to get out of the beaker so I added some water I then stirred it around to dissolve the alcohol and I pulled it out with a magnet then when it completely separated I dumped off the water the magnetite now was a lot more clumped up and I found that it made it easier to remove there were probably many cleaner ways that I could have done it but I decided to just scoop it out with a paper towel I would normally do this directly over a garbage can but for some reason when I was filming it I decided to do it like this this caused it to be even a bit more messy than usual but it still wasn't too bad all of this was then just thrown into the garbage and now I can show you how we clean the glassware but first I just wanted to add that throwing coded magnetite nanoparticles into the garbage is legally fine but there is some concern that it could be potentially harmful some organisms might not be able to handle it properly and it can cause some problems by leaving mine out for so long though the particles all got oxidized and aggregated and they were definitely no longer nicely sized nanoparticles also the scale that I did this on was pathetically small and my total waste from each attempt was probably something around three grams in this process every single piece of glassware that I used got covered in oily iron and it really didn't like coming off this was especially a problem when I started playing around with the ferrofluid because that stuff really liked to coat itself on everything so now in terms of cleaning the first step was to wipe off as much as I could just with some paper towels then after that I threw them all into the sink which I had filled with some really soapy water the soap was able to interact with the oleic acid on the magnetite and with a lot of scrubbing I was able to clean off almost everything however there was always still a bit of iron stuck to the glass and to get rid of it I had to put it in an acid bath this was filled with 10% hydrochloric acid and it converted any iron or magnetite back to its soluble chloride form this did sometimes take a while though so I usually left it in there overnight then in the morning I took them all out and I washed them under the tap in the acid there was a small amount of iron chloride so this did cause it to get washed down the drain in large amounts this would be a problem but they're so little here and it's so heavily diluted that it really isn't much of an issue after washing it all under the tab I rinsed everything with distilled water and then I let it sit out to dry most of the time this gave me really nice and shiny glassware but sometimes there was still a bit of iron left when this happened though I just had to put it back in the acid bath for another round now one thing that it kind of just glossed over was the big plastic container that I used for the reaction I wasn't able to scrub it because it would scratch the plastic so instead I just used a paper towel it was also too big to fit into the acid bath so instead I put acid into the container itself and I used more paper towel to manually wipe it down then like with everything else I washed it with tap water followed by distilled water and I let it sit out to dry when it was done the container was clean enough to do another round but it was never as nice as when it started but anyway that's about it I hope you guys enjoyed watching me do this little cleanup and I'll see you on the next one as usual a big things goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see my videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube also everyone on patreon can directly message me and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music] [Music] you

Channel: NileBlue

Views: 601,702

Keywords: nile, red, blue, science, chemistry, ferrofluid, cleanup, waste, nileblue

Id: c945OLTPyWQ

Length: 7min 49sec (469 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2019