My manganese heptoxide cleanup was a mess

in my last video you guys seem to really like to clean up and from now on I think I'll try to post most of my project cleanups here for this one I'll be covering what I did with all that nasty waste that I had after making and reacting the manganese heptoxide after each run I was left with a dish full of junk and I just dumped it into this beaker I also threw in all the glass pipettes that I used but it probably should have put them in a different beaker I washed each dish with a bunch of extra water but most of them were still covered with a small film of yellowish manganese dioxide to get rid of that though I just dropped them into my acid bath and I let them soak for a few hours then I took them out wash them with water and let them dry this left me with a bunch of clean watch glasses and I put them all back in my drawer now back to the actual waste I mixed it around a bit and then I added some isopropyl alcohol this reacted with any soluble per mag Anik acid that still might remain and converted it to insoluble manganese dioxide and in doing so the alcohol was oxidized and it turned into acetone I let this react for about an hour and then I started taking out the pipettes I washed them as best as I could with water and I tossed all of them into my glass waste box this was all still very acidic because of the sulfuric acid and I now had to neutralize it this was done by just pouring in a concentrated solution of sodium hydroxide drain cleaner this quickly reacted with the sulfuric acid to make water and sodium sulfate I just kept adding it and occasionally checking the pH with pH papers and I eventually got it to be about neutral with the acid gone the next step was to knock out any manganese ions that still might be dissolved in the water these manganese ions are the main danger with this waste and it's why it can't just be poured down the drain to knock them out though I just poured in some regular bleach when only a relatively small amount is added it should react with the manganese ions and convert them to insoluble manganese dioxide it might also make some other oxide forms of manganese but these are also insoluble so isn't much of an issue after doing this I realized that I probably could have used dilute hydrogen peroxide instead which i think would have been better this is because bleach contains chlorine so there'll be some chloride ions as side products with peroxide though it's a lot cleaner and the only side product would have really just been water it was a bit hard to tell but after a while a lot of solid had separated to see if it were done I took out a small sample filtered it and added more bleach I didn't film that part but nothing ended up coming out so I moved on to filtering this was just done through a coffee filter and a nice yellow colored solution came through I'm not entirely sure though what exactly was causing the color from this I was hoping that I'd be able to collect some decent quality manganese dioxide that I could use in a future video so when it was done I spread out the filter paper and I let it dry for a couple days I was originally planning to just pour the solution down the drain which mostly just had inert salts in it like sodium sulfate however the yellowness of it kind of threw me off and I didn't feel comfortable doing that so what I decided to do instead was to just throw it on a hot plate and evaporate off all the water after heating it for several minutes the color started changing and it became kind of brown so I swapped it for a nicer white background over the next couple hours all the water disappeared and I was left with an almost dry powder what was weird was that it looked and smelled very similar to some of the steps in my video were extracted urea from my own pee I think this was because in some of my runs with the heptoxide I'd used something called aniline most of it probably burned and disappeared but I'm sure that some of it along with its waste products were still mixed in here and some of these products might have contained the nitrogen that was originally in the aniline a lot of nitrogen containing compounds tend to stink and they also definitely contribute to the smell of pee so somehow here under the heat I either made some chemicals that were the same as the ones in the pee or at least they just smelled the same either way though it was pretty gross and I'm thankful I had a fume hood to protect me when this was done I took it off the hot plate and I went back to check on my filter paper unfortunately though it was now a total mess because I didn't bother trying to wash it with water and it was now all crusted over with salts once it is dried they're also really wasn't much of it either so it was pretty much just all junk now I dumped out all the other waste on top of this and I originally planned for this to be the end I was maybe gonna let it dry out a bit more then throw it all into a bag and store it in my waste drawer however for some reason I really wanted to try heating it with my blowtorch I just thought that this might have been interesting to do but in general it's not a good idea or environmentally friendly to burn waste especially without the proper filters I considered this part to be a final little experiment and not part of the actual waste management process also another thing to keep in mind is that burning waste like this can be dangerous because they didn't know exactly what was in here there was a small chance that I could start producing some toxic gases so it was important to be careful most of what I had here was just sodium sulfate and manganese dioxide though so I assumed that it was probably just gonna melt but just to be sure of this I tried testing it on a small amount of it and that was pretty much what happened based on this I committed to trying it on the whole thing and it was able to completely melt it I did my best to try to keep everything on the dish but some of it ended up flying off for the time being I just ignored it though and I dealt with it later on when it completely melted I stopped heating it and I let it cool back to room temperature as it cooled it changed colors a bit and it also cracked my dish but I pretty much expected that to happen it separated pretty easily from the glass and it was relatively fragile it felt and sounded very similar to porcelain though which I thought was interesting as I said before I think it was made mostly of sodium sulfate along with some manganese dioxide and maybe some chloride salts i recollected all the ash and the other stuff that got scattered before and I tried melting it in a beaker I did this to try to prevent it from flying everywhere again but it didn't work very well unlike before after it had cooled it didn't just easily separate to try to get it out I poked and scraped at it but I ended up just giving up and breaking the bottom out but anyway the final waste that I had were these large chunks and a bunch of broken glass this was all just put into some plastic bags and I marked them with some info about the project that they were from I then threw both of them into my waste drawer for indefinite storage in a couple decades though when I do eventually run out of space to store my waste I will have to pay a company to deal with everything that I've created

Channel: NileBlue

Views: 2,846,344

Keywords: nile, blue, red, science, chemistry, manganese, heptoxide, waste management, waste processing, cleanup, nileblue

Id: 8zilEg_feZA

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019