Thats one ugly fucking kludge with the piping. Jesus christ.
Note to self-do NOT let the bugger responsible for that ABORTION of a piece of work anywhere remotely near the vicinity of the lab, the volatiles and corrosives fridge where I keep particularly volatile solvents, ether, THF and the likes, as well as things that need to be kept cool, such as the easily oxidized benzaldehyde, along with generic 'nasties' that want nothing better than to eat your face off, such as my bottles of bromine, iodine monochloride, and perishables such as acid anhydrides, carboxylic acid chlorides and similar acylating and halogenating reagents, or anywhere near the chemical cupboard in the kitchen, the chromic acid wastes tank sat just outside said cupboard (hexavalent chromium is pretty noxious stuff, carcinogenic and toxic, and both the chromic acid itself, and the wastes, are Cr in its (VI) oxidation state. Can't just go down the drain, it'd poison the environment, and potentially people too.
so I just let it all build up in demijohns, until there is enough to warrant evaporating or vacuum distilling, once I replace my rotary vane pump, off all the water, to the extent that the hexavalent chromium wastes are reduced to a thick, pasty consistency (after pouring out of the demijohns of course otherwise it'd be a bugger to get back out again and bollocks if I'm going to be farting about trying to poke out a crap ton of hexavalent chromium slops from a big jar with a too-narrow mouth to get sludge out), I've every intention of recycling it all, not taking it to the recycle depo, I mean, but recycling it for the chromium salts, with the intention of oxidizing it back to sodium dichromate, so I can re-use it for making more chromic acid ('chromic acid' in this context, isn't intended to mean H2Cr2O4, specifically, but a mixed bag of oxidizing species created when a dichromate salt is added to concentrated sulfuric acid. It's not something you want to be exposed to, and it damn well isn't something that can be allowed to escape into nature, toxic, carcinogenic, but its very good at doing what it does; namely burning the living shit out of tars, stains, polymerized byproducts of this, that and t'other, for when you've gotten flasks, test tubes, beakers, condensers etc. all grimy and in need of being slapped about mercilessly until it screams and runs away.
But it does create nasty heavy metal wastes, Cr in its trivalent state is a lot less toxic, but hexavalent (Cr (VI) ) chromium is really toxic ugly stuff, I prefer to use it over piranha acid though for when the big guns need to be pulled out for cleaning house, so to speak; because piranha acid is fucking dangerous shit, and base piranha damages glass, and is unsuitable especially for what I use piranha mixtures for, cleaning buchner funnel frits, because base piranha actually removes a very thin layer of glass from the item being cleaned. Not something the likes of a thick walled flask or the like can't handle if it really needs to be used, but completely unsuitable for use cleaning frits, because the porosity of them is critical, and they are graded according to the size of the pores. My finest one for example, for small scale work, microscale to a few grams, is so damn fine, in terms of the porosity of the frit, that it'll stop a good many bacteria, if not most of them, maximal pore size is just 5 microns, lower end is about 3.5-4 microns in diameter, so corroding the glass with the likes of base piranha would be unthinkable, and severely compromize the glassware.
So why not recycle, turn it back into dichromate, reclaim the sulfuric acid too possibly, by distillation under hard vacuum, granted thats being a real cheapskate, since sulfuric is cheap as chips, but I do go through quite a lot of H2SO4, that, along with hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) along with perhaps, ammonia, are probably the 4 chemicals I use most of, and in bulk. Sulfuric especially as it has so many uses, when concentrated, useful for synthesizing ethers out of alcohols, including diethyl ether for solvent use, or if the synthesis temperature is tweaked up, diethyl sulfate, an alkylating agent (extremely toxic too, but good at ethylating things. Unfortunately DNA is one of them, so it needs to be used with extreme caution), or higher still, ethylene gas. Good for dehydrating gases that won't react with it, for making chromic acid etch for glass cleaning, for preparing sulfate salts, or the last resort glassware cleaners piranha acid (mixture of concentrated sulfuric acid/hydrogen peroxide 3:1) or base piranha (strong peroxide, mixed with concentrated aqueous ammonia, or the more vicious 'base bath' variation on base piranha, leaves out the NH3 and substitutes caustic potash. Damages glass though so it can only be used as a last resort and on certain types of glassware, because it strips a thin surface layer of glass right out from under the nasty ass baked-on grime), as well as making bisulfate, for dehydrating things, scrubbing various noxious gaseous fumes, such as neutralizing ammonia gas effluent when bubbled through first a suck-back arrestor and then into a trap containing some sulfuric acid, which neutralizes the ammonia as ammonium sulfate, from which the ammonia can be recycled by just adding sodium hydroxide, displacing NH3 gas and forming sodium sulfate as a byproduct, which itself won't be wasted because when roasted to it's anhydrous state, it can be used as a gentle dessicant for drying the nonpolar phase of acid-base extractions whilst the solute is still in there, so things crystallize well, as an alternative to anhydrous magnesium sulfate)
(I'm all for efficiency and recycling in my lab doings, and try to arrange things so even the waste products of waste products of byproducts end up finding a new life as something else of use. The local fire dept. wanted to look over the lab at one point, after being made aware of it by the filth, after the latter pack of shiteating rat bastards had illegally entered and searched the place. Not that there is a damn point, given they aren't chemists, and unless something was labelled 'nitroglycerin' or stuffed into capped steel pipes full of shrapnel with a fuse pointing out of one end, then there isn't anything they could find even if it was there. They are far too stupid, too much of a blunt instrument. Which have no place anywhere NEAR a lab. Assuming they wished to minimize dang,er to the public, they would do a lot fucking better by clearing the fuck off and going nowhere near the place. THEY are a damn danger to the public, let near chemicals they have no idea of the reactivity, toxicity, flammability, corrosive capabilities or potential pyrophoricity. Open the wrong jar or bottle in my reagent stores, and there are things that would gas the person doing so, if they were not set up to open the thing in the correct way with ventilation, possibly specific atmospheric requirements, aversity to moisture etc., or even burst into flames on contact with air.
