Laboratory
In the laboratory, chemical wastes are usually segregated on-site into appropriate waste carboys, and disposed by a specialist contractor in order to meet safety, health, and legislative requirements.
Waste organic solvents are separated into chlorinated and non-chlorinated solvent waste. Chlorinated solvent waste is usually incinerated at high temperature to minimize the formation of dioxins. Non-chlorinated solvent waste can be burned for energy recovery. Innocuous aqueous waste (such as solutions of sodium chloride) may be poured down the sink; aqueous waste containing toxic compounds are collected separately.
Waste elemental mercury, spent acids and bases may be collected separately for recycling.
Broken glassware are usually collected in plastic-lined cardboard boxes for landfilling. Due to contamination, they are usually not suitable for recycling. Similarly, used hypodermic needles are collected as sharps and are incinerated as medical waste.
Read more about this topic: Chemical Waste
Famous quotes containing the word laboratory:
“With all of its bad influences, T.V. is not to be feared.... It can be a fairly safe laboratory for confronting, seeing through, and thus being immunized against unhealthy values so as to be “in the world but not of it.””
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist’s work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation. Art is the laboratory for making new men.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)