Comment by dekhn
4 years ago
Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.
4 years ago
Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.
> Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution?
Quite possibly!
The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels.
After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water.
Those were the days :eek:
How did you deal with it? I would expect they don't take returns.
The same thing that happens when someone quits.
The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.
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This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building. And getting those weird questions like, "Inventory says we have 500ml of X, anyone know where it is?"
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You call your university's EHS department and tell them as much about what you know about the contents of the bottle (which may not be what is on the label). They seal off the lab, remove it, and using what they can determine about the contents, destroy it safely.