Lab Cleanouts Gone Wrong: The Weirdest Chemicals Hiding in Universities and Schools

Institutional memory is short, institutional storage is long, and the gap between them can be explosive. Q&As in this blog include:

1. Why would anyone need to ask questions about old chemicals?
2. Haven’t modern safety regulations fixed this?
3. What’s the #1 scariest thing you can find during a university lab cleanout?
4. What’s #2?
5. Aren’t labels informative by definition?
6. Is this only about chemistry departments?
7. How does this stuff just accumulate?
8. What should you do if you suspect your institution owns one of these chemical hazards?
9. Where can you get comprehensive advice & help for dealing with unknown chemical wastes in universities and schools?

Why would anyone need to ask questions about old chemicals? Chemistry doesn’t go bad, does it? After all, it’s not milk.

No, but it’s not exactly a fine wine either.

Chemistry has a temperament, and after thirty years in a cabinet under the fluorescent lighting next to a leaky radiator, that temperament turns foul.

A bottle of diethyl ether doesn’t “expire” the way a coupon does. It slowly, patiently, without any complaint whatsoever, converts itself into a shock-sensitive explosive. It does so quietly, on its own schedule, and it doesn’t send a memo.

This is the essential comedy of the American academic laboratory. Somewhere between the founding of the chemistry department and the present semester, someone bought a chemical, used a third of it, and put the rest on a shelf “for later.”

But “later” is now. In point of fact, “later” is always now. That’s the central design flaw of institutions: they’re great at acquiring things and catastrophic at getting rid of them.

Haven’t modern safety regulations fixed this?

Regulations are marvelous things for telling you what you may or may not do going forward. But they’re considerably less effective at retroactively un-buying a bottle of picric acid that some assistant professor ordered for a synthesis lab during the Nixon administration.

The rules have changed. The bottle doesn’t know that the rules have changed. It’s just been sitting there, quietly drying out, growing crystals on its cap threads, waiting… waiting… waiting.

What’s the #1 scariest thing you can find during a university lab cleanout?

Picric acid. Hands down. And it ain’t even close.

Chemically, it’s a perfectly respectable compound used historically as a dye, an antiseptic, and (pertinent to the present conversation) a component in some formulations for explosives.

However, once the water content of picric acid evaporates to below about ten percent, it becomes shock- and friction-sensitive. So, that metal cap you’re unscrewing? That’s friction. That corroded threading grinding against the crystallized compound underneath the lid? That’s also friction.

Some of our more tenured (read: old) hazardous waste experts have a saying, more grim than clever: “Don’t twist the cap, call the bomb squad.”

And that’s not hyperbole.

Actual municipal bomb disposal units have been summoned to actual universities to actually detonate actual bottles of picric acid found in actual storage closets, because that was judged to be safer than opening them—actually.

What’s #2?

Ethers such as diethyl ether, isopropyl ether, tetrahydrofuran, and dioxane. These are the ones that fool people, because they seem so ordinary. (Solvents? So boring.) But the problem is oxygen.

Given time and light exposure, ethers slowly form peroxides. Those peroxides concentrate as the more volatile ether evaporates. Thus, you end up with crystals forming around the cap or at the liquid’s surface—sometimes visible as a faint frosting—and those crystals are explosive when disturbed, dried out, or heated.

Think of it this way. Evaporation is not your friend here. It’s a concentrating machine for danger, working for free, around the clock, and indifferent to your semester schedule.

The truly perverse part is that the older the bottle, the more dangerous opening it becomes. And yet nobody affixes a label that cautions INCREASINGLY HAZARDOUS WITH TIME, PLEASE HANDLE WITH ESCALATING CARE! Instead, they just mark it ETHER and cite a purchase date so old that it’s in Roman numerals.

Aren’t labels informative by definition?

In theory. But out in the field, our hazardous waste experts have encountered a taxonomy of label failure that could fill a graduate seminar. Some notorious examples:

• Labels written in fountain pen, faded to illegibility, the ink having made a personal safety decision to abandon its post.
• Labels with only a compound’s common nickname from a defunct 1970s catalog — useful to nobody, including, one suspects, the original professor who’s now in semicomatose retirement at The Villages. (Chair yoga, anyone?)
• Labels that have fallen off entirely, leaving a rectangle of paler glass and a bottle of anonymous liquid that must now be treated, per protocol, as though it’s the worst thing it could plausibly be. (See Q.3)
• And our team favorite: labels that are perfectly legible, beautifully preserved, and simply wrong because the container got reused for a different compound and nobody updated the paperwork.

Is this only about chemistry departments? What about the biology, art, and shop classes?

The chemistry department gets the reputation. But our hazardous waste experts have seen more genuinely bewildering finds in art studios and biology prep rooms, because the denizens therein think that they’re only handling “supplies” when—in fact—they’re handling hazmat. Some repeat offenders:

• Photography darkrooms (remember those?) hoard silver nitrate and various developer and fixer chemistries that are toxic and, in some formulations, flammable.
• Ceramics studios stockpile heavy-metal glazes like lead, cadmium, and barium compounds, all “sourced” in bulk decades ago because bulk was cheaper and nobody was thinking about eventual disposal.
• Biology prep rooms accumulate formalin, old fixatives, and reagent bottles from taxidermy or dissection units going back to when film strips projectors were the cutting-edge in classroom technology.
• Vocational and shop classes turn up old asbestos-containing materials, cyanide-based metal-plating solutions, and mercury. (Mercury seems to show up everywhere because it used to be in everything from thermometers to “silent” electrical switches to “fun” bouncing-ball demonstrations.)

How does this stuff just accumulate? Don’t people clean labs periodically?

Here we arrive at the actual economics of the situation.

Disposal costs money and carries paperwork. Conversely, storage costs nothing and carries no paperwork, at least not until an inspector or a new department chair opens a cabinet and asks some uncomfortable questions.

Every individual actor along the way faces a private incentive to defer the cost of disposal onto the next person. (E.g., the professor who retires, the grad student who graduates, the department that reorganizes, the safety officer who inherits someone else’s cabinet, etc.)

Nobody wants to be the one who spends departmental budget getting rid of Professor Whoever’s stuff from 1978. So, it sits. This is not laziness, exactly. It’s a fairly ordinary example of what economists would recognize as diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, playing out one shelf at a time, for fifty years, until an entire building becomes an inadvertent chemical archive.

What should you do if you suspect your institution owns one of these chemical hazards?

First, don’t touch unidentified crystalline residues. Don’t move unlabeled bottles. And especially, don’t allow well-meaning staff to “just clean it up” on some rainy Saturday.

Second, get a proper chemical inventory and hazard assessment done by a qualified hazardous waste management company, not the chemistry TA who drew the short straw.

Third, budget for disposal as an ongoing operational cost, not a one-time emergency line item. Otherwise, the “one-time emergency” will recur every time someone retires or a building gets renovated.

Where can you get comprehensive advice & help for dealing with unknown chemical wastes in universities and schools?

Don’t wait for the bomb squad to become part of your campus tour. Hazardous Waste Experts can inventory, identify, and safely remove aging reagents, ether peroxides, and mystery bottles before they become emergencies.

Our trained specialists handle proper classification, packaging, and disposal in full compliance with EPA and OSHA regulations, turning that quiet liability in the third-floor closet into a documented, resolved issue, and giving your administration real peace of mind.

Contact us today!