> Hazardous material does not become hazardous waste if you can legitimately sell/ship it off the site as a worthwhile product instead. Otherwise if you need to truly discard excess (even prime chemical assets then become a liability) you need to not only usually pay, but bump your paperwork and liability up from merely dangerous goods to full waste documentation requirements.
This is what I meant. For a small organization I would expect a lot of small volume experimental products that are not exactly known in composition combined with perhaps some rinse acetone or other solvents.
Have you encountered an example where this works? I've done consulting for startups in exchange for a fume hood before, so I guess it's not that out there. It's much harder to imagine doing this for a big hazardous waste site, but maybe?
Thanks for the idea, I definitely won't be trying to do that but maybe there could be a symbiotic thing going on there. Probably a lot easier to do that with a university somehow? A national lab will be too stuck up to accept hazardous waste or advice, but maybe a university would hire you part time to work for them while letting you use the space for your own project.
Yup, I'm moving toward "retiring" from my employer and doing without a lab for a bit as I decide to get back into more action than the employer can muster.
I'll be able to maintain a good relationship with them and if I do go back into private practice nearby they will be able to handle the few liters a month I would expect to generate single-handedly.
Which is a drop in the bucket of their few drums, which are a drop in the bucket of the EPA waste hauler's truckloads.
Unknowns-R-Us.
OTOH the only time I went without a lab I built, was 2013 and I was tempted to try and operate in some vacant small-university space in my late father's retirement location, but I did not have the resources to _branch out_ while I still had my main lab in mothballs.
Things were also very uncertain plus one of the surplus spaces had already been unfavorably occupied by a not-very-well liked commercial EPA testing lab that I think failed just a year or two earlier and left everyone involved with a bad impression.
Now after recovering a bit from natural disaster, I'm going to check out UH where they took over the old Schlumberger facility as part of their energy effort a number of years ago. It still seems not fully occupied but I'll find out for sure eventually. Before the internet I sure spent a lot of time in the UH library.
When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.
I started out as a teenage businessman anyway so I'm not worried about going forward with only a briefcase again.
> When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.
This is basically my part time job now, I help maintain a university lab including things like repairing ancient equipment, training grad student TAs, helping the lecturers plan and run their experiments, and then just random grad students and professors drop in for advice and help. It's pretty fun.
What I don't do is take advantage of the fact that I have a chem lab attached for any personal work, I've never actually thought to ask. I have asked about setting up a catalyst test reactor lab to collaborate with the college of computing to see if we can build a testing lab for anyone creating new catalysts to analyze the results and invent new types. There were too many professors with a vested interest in doing that kind of project so they had no interest in supporting it.
It was very disappointing to see, I'd have been happy to run a test facility for all the professors to work with as a shared experimental facility but they all wanted to be the one to get the papers first. The minor consideration to me of being able to do some of my own research projects with the setup and a salary is all I'd have wanted out of it, I love mentoring students and would have loved to provide deep expertise to students working on such projects...
Could have made three departments able to produce high quality research in a field that no one here seems to actually be good at (i.e. traditional heterogeneous catalysts) with ChemE, MatSci, and CompSci all benefiting from the ability to generate large reliable datasets of how new catalytic materials behave in traditional chemical reactors. So cheap to set up too... just such a shame that I cannot do such a project at the place I work despite having been the director of chemical process development and specifically catalyst development at previous jobs. Ostensibly because professors are already doing it in their labs, but like, why would you not take advantage of expertise like mine to make these projects work?
So bizarre but I just don't have the stamina to push them on it, I probably literally just have to switch job titles for them to even notice that I am in fact a world class expert on catalysts and chemical processing. Instead I'm repairing oscilloscopes which is super fun but I sure miss doing actual research that matters.
This is what I meant. For a small organization I would expect a lot of small volume experimental products that are not exactly known in composition combined with perhaps some rinse acetone or other solvents.
Have you encountered an example where this works? I've done consulting for startups in exchange for a fume hood before, so I guess it's not that out there. It's much harder to imagine doing this for a big hazardous waste site, but maybe?
Thanks for the idea, I definitely won't be trying to do that but maybe there could be a symbiotic thing going on there. Probably a lot easier to do that with a university somehow? A national lab will be too stuck up to accept hazardous waste or advice, but maybe a university would hire you part time to work for them while letting you use the space for your own project.