My chromyl chloride cleanup was a disaster

on my main channel Nile red I recently made one of my favorite chemicals called chromel chloride it's a blood-red toxic and carcinogenic liquid and I just think that it's really fun and interesting after making it though I was left with a lot of dirty glassware and a bunch of chromium waste that I had to deal with so in this video I'm gonna show you guys how I dealt with everything when I made the chromel chloride I did it in a flask that was already connected to a distillation setup this way after it was made I was able to immediately distill it and separate it from the side products I collected everything on the other side of the set up in a different flask and when I was done I just took it off this left me though with an entire distillation setup that was covered with chromel chloride as well as a reaction flask with all the side products to deal with this the first step was to fill up a container with a solution of sodium sulfite the concentration here really didn't matter though so I just filled it with water and threw in a random amount of the sulfite then I took the setup apart as carefully as possible and I tried to not spill any of the chromel chloride however dropping a small amount of it was almost unavoidable every piece was dropped into the sulfite bath and the red color quickly turned green because the chromium was being reduced this was converting it from its nasty and red 6 plus oxidation state to its green 3 plus 1 which was much safer and not nearly as toxic pretty much everything that I used in this project was put into this bath at some point and I let it soak until I didn't see any of the red color then after that I could take the piece out and rinse it with a bunch of water to get rid of any chromium ions that might still remain as I said before the chromium was now in its three-plus state but it still wasn't something that I could just pour down the drain so I was actually kind of making more waste here that I would eventually have to deal with however as long as I was working with the chromo chloride I had to keep a bath like this around this bath was of course useful for washing things but it was also for safety purposes in case I had to neutralize a whole bunch of the chromic Laura with that being said though this meant that this bath was something that I'd have to have for the entire project and I would only be able to deal with it at the very end so now I went back to the flask which was full of the reaction side products as well as a bunch of chromel chloride the side products themselves were safe and non-toxic and ideally I would have just separated them out and thrown them in the garbage however they were unfortunately all mixed in with the chromium and it wasn't really worth trying to separate but anyway to deal with this the first thing that I did was at a bunch of sodium sulfite solution to destroy any chromium 6 that was there the added water would also dissolve some of the side product salts which would help get them out of the flask as we saw before it all quickly turned green but this time it also warmed up quite a bit this was because there was still a lot of concentrated sulfuric acid that was left over from the reaction and it generated a lot of heat when it dissolved into the water to a certain extent the reaction with the chromo chloride also generated some heat but I don't think that it was nearly as much as the sulfuric acid with a glass rod I mixed it around a bit but because it got so hot I decided to leave it overnight to cool this kind of turned out to be a bad idea though because when I came back the next day it had completely solidified there was a solid brick of junk that had formed at the bottom and I wasn't even able to take out the glass rod to deal with this I started by dumping out all the water into a ball then I poured in a bunch of hot water and I poked around at it a bit the stuff at the bottom had totally solidified but it was all still soluble in water so all I had to do was let it sit there and to occasionally mix it around I also sometimes used my heat gun to warm it up and it actually went way faster than I expected at first I honestly thought that it was going to take the entire day but it ended up being done in less than half an hour I then poured it all into the same bowl and there was almost nothing left in the flask just for good measure though I quickly rinsed it with water and I put the flask into the sulfide bath from earlier at this point I could have just poured all of this waste into a bottle and forgotten about it but I don't really like storing it like this not only does all the extra water make it take up more space it also has the risk of leaking which can be a huge pain so I wanted to get rid of all the water but it wasn't the best idea to just try and evaporate it it was still full of acid especially hydrochloric acid which would release fumes and corrode everything around it to fix this problem might have to neutralize it and I did this by using a really concentrated solution of sodium hydroxide drain cleaner this reacted very quickly with any acid that was there which was mostly sulfuric acid in hydrochloric acid and it converted them to sodium salts doing this though generated a lot of heat and the mixture started heating up quite a bit it also took way more sodium hydroxide than I expected and the bowl was getting a bit too fall the safe thing to do would have been to transfer it to a bigger container but I decided that it was more fun to add solid sodium hydroxide this would help prevent the volume from increasing but it generally isn't a great idea because sodium hydroxide alone generates a lot of heat when it dissolves into water so that along with the reaction with the acid it could easily start generating enough heat to boil the water this usually just happens in the area around the hydroxide though and you can hear the faint rumbling sound that it made however as more was added things got hotter and hotter and eventually a lot of the water started boiling as well this was a pretty solid warning sign to stop and to wait for it to cool down but I was curious to see what would happen if I kept going with the next few addition it actually kind of seemed okay but then on one of them they decided to pop and make a mess this was really not surprising and I kind of thought this would happen to clean this up i rinsed the paper and added the water to the bowl and then I let it cool down overnight the next day it tested the pH and it was still slightly acidic so I had to add some more hydroxide as it had cooled though some of the water had evaporated and I could now go back to using a solution this time when I added it a bunch of solid stuff came out which was all chromium hydroxide I was originally planning to just bring it to the neutral point but at the last minute I decided to make it strongly basic I did this because I wanted to be absolutely sure that all the acid was destroyed and that it wouldn't fume at all when I felt that it looked okay I tested the pH again and this time it was really basic at this high pH all the chromium had been converted to chromium hydroxide but this can also cause some of the chromium to read as off so unfortunately I wasn't able to just filter everything off and throw away the water and I had to evaporate it adding the hydroxide caused everything to heat up again and as it cooled a bunch of salts crystallized on the surface this was kind of a bad sign though because it meant that evaporating it was going to take forever so I just put it in the back corner of the room and I let it sit there for about two weeks when I came back to it this was what I had and it was completely stuck in the ball I was planning to just cover it and be done with it but again I decided to try something different I wanted to get it all out of the bowl and put it in a bag instead but it seemed like a huge pain to do it by hand so I figured I'd try to use some power tools which I've never really done before I got the bright idea that using a drill might make it easier and I also thought that it might be kind of funny initially it actually worked really well and I was able to quickly make a bunch of holes I started in the middle area because I felt that it was the safest and I was a bit afraid of getting too close to the sides I was really worried that if it hit the edge that it might crack the ball as I kept doing it though it was all relatively and it didn't seem like too much of an issue I ended up going faster and faster though and I think I got a little bit careless and well I learned why you aren't supposed to be using a drill on things like this I now had a bit of a glass mess to deal with but it wasn't a huge problem I just smashed a bunch of it with a hammer and then manually peeled away the rest all the glass was thrown into my glass waste bin and I didn't really care about the bowl because I think it cost me like $2 the chunk that I was left with was surprisingly well formed but when I picked it up I could tell that it was still full of water so again for another time I decided to deviate from my plan and instead of just storing it I wanted to break it up into pieces and to dry it even more to do this it was actually pretty easy and I put it all into a plastic bag and hit it with a hammer when it was Donna dumped it all into a large dish and I let it dry for a few more days in this time it all ended up turning white and it seemed to be mostly dry but it was actually still full of water I knew this because when I shot it very quickly with a blowtorch it all started spitting out water I think this was because there was a huge amount of sodium sulfate here which formed from the reaction between the sodium hydroxide and the sulfuric acid this salt like many others is able to absorb water and to form a complex with it this physically incorporates the water into it so it's no longer able to evaporate if I wanted to fully try it I had to first break down this complex by heating it and then I had to keep heating it to drive off the water this was actually pretty easy to do though and I just put it all into an oven at around 90 C very quickly it all started liquefying and over the course of a few hours I was able to completely dry it when I felt that it was done it took it out of the oven let it cool down and scraped it all off the - without any water the volume of it was a lot less and it also didn't weigh as much and I was able to pack it into a much smaller bag if I wanted to I could probably crush it up even more and to get it somewhere around half of this volume for me though I was done adding more steps in work and I was ok with this now the last thing that I had to deal with was the bath that I used earlier the process for this though was pretty much the same as before except without all those other kind of dumb steps that I added the initial volume of it was a bit too big so it just let it evaporate over the course of about a week and then I transferred it to a smaller - what I had here now was probably slightly acidic but there was so little acid that it really wasn't worth neutralizing I just directly through it all into my oven and cranked up the heat this again dried over the course of a few hours and then I scraped it off put it all into a small bag and that was pretty much it in the end I was left with these two bags of solid waste which are honestly probably just non-toxic sodium and potassium salts if I were to throw out a completely random estimate I'd say that it's probably less than 10 percent chromium but anyway I of course don't have any real use for this so I just put it all into my waste drawer and that was basically it this whole cleanup turned out to be a much bigger adventure than I expected and it's mostly because I tried to make it a bit more interesting for almost all the projects on my main channel I'm restricted to a specific process but I find it fun that with the cleanup I can kind of do whatever I want so while I am still dealing with the chemicals properly and I'm sure there is some useful info in this video please don't use it as a perfect reference for proper waste management 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 five dollars or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music]

Channel: NileBlue

Views: 4,167,927

Rating: 4.9427667 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, blue, nilered, nileblue, science, chemistry, cleanup, chromyl, chloride, waste, reaction

Id: b6R2sTjtUFs

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019