SWIM's going to be basifying his acid/water with NaOH. The pH should be around 13.

Problem is, swim doesn't have a pH meter or papers (shame on swim, the one thing he forgot to buy at the lab store). There's no way in hell swim is dumping this stuff down the drain. Any suggestions? SWIM could buy some vinegar maybe to help.

Otherwise he'd have to dilute it, and diluting almost a gallon of pH 13 water........that's a lot of water.

Any ideas?

E.C.

well...drain cleaner is full of lye..so if you have any plugged drains..there you go..vinegar does work though..

You could use vinegar to bring it back to a semineutral ph if you wanted. It'd be kinda expensive after a while and leave you with even more watery soup that now also reeks of vinegar to dump down the drain.

Not sure why people have such an aversion to washing it down the drain though. Drain cleaner is primarily lye as it is and as soon as the water gets dumped into a main pipe its going to hit all the water from everyone else and be pretty well diluted in hundreds of gallons of water.

ive heard from people that basic solutions flush quite well down the toilet. Though i would double check that your pipes are alright for such a basic solution, i remember reading that they can damage certain types of old pipes, not sure which though.

SWIM would highly recommend the toilet, rather than drains. If SWIY lives in an apartment, odors may emit from neighbors' drains. Not all drains and pipes are well suited for lye, but toilets tend to have a greater potential for dilution.

Put it in the drain - No big deal... it's not going to pollute your communities water supply.

What about if someone has a septic tank? Will anything use in the STB tek screw up the enzymes in a septic tank?

I just put all my plant material into a plastic bag and tossed it into a dumpster... and rinsed the jar in the sink..

Toilet would work too.

SWIM uses a septic system, so SWIM sends his waste product to the dump.

I roflmao'd at this.

Pouring base down drains and toilets is good for your drains and toilets. What do you think draino is? Its usually just lye and some colorants.

For non polar solvents next time you have a bon fire or camp fire just pour the shit on there and watch it burn its basically lighter fluid.

Why not pour it down the drain? Please explain!
If it's an environmental question, you can be cool. It's not harmful, it will degrade safely.

EDIT: How did I manage to not see the age of this thread?
Where did you put the waste?

down the drain

Oh that's good! I kinda went ahead and tipped the lye at the back in the bush . I put three lemons worth of juice to lower the pH though. Next time I will have some empty jugs ready, so I can just dump the jugs.

I know the thread is super old, but personally I'd avoid the dumpster. People are stupid, and kids are people. Basified solutions don't belong where people can get into easily. Please use your sink/toilet. If you can't do this because of septic, dig a hole and dump it in, cover hole.

Sorry if this info is a repeat: toilets have 4" drain pipes and sinks have 2", so I go for the toilet.

This thread is 6 years old!

Incorrect, it's 8 years

Soooooooooo

It seems that toilets and random dumpsters are the go-to method when it comes to the disposal of the ultra-basified aqueous phase.

The thread seems to ignore the fact that these extractions--mescaline extractions (using benzene derivatives as NPS) generating the the largest quantity of toxic waste byproducts among all commonplace extraction teks (SANS harmalas); in most cases >>>1000ml of xylene/toluene/benzene is consumed in a single extraction; due to the presence of oxidizing agent (in most cases this being sulfuric acid, HCl, NaOH, etc.; however under right conditions even weaker acids/bases such as vinegar and citric acid can change structure of xylene, making it more reactive and changing its chemical properties in unknown ways), the petrochemical alkane/aromatic/mixed hydrocarbon solvent (e.g. hexane/xylene/naphtha) undergoes some fun & spunky & totally unpredictable redox reactions to form a soup of much more reactive (READ: EXPLOSIVE AND TOXIC) byproducts which would cost hundreds of dollars' worth of lab gear/reagents and hours of intense anal-retentive labor (AKA a jungle of really dangerous reactions and fractional distillations and Dean-Stark trappings you really should NOT be doing in your kitchen) to be made back into their original forms AFAIK. Hell, even though a fraction of the NPS used in mescal extraction is used for spice extractions, many standard DMT teks still generate generous amounts of similar such byproducts, especially so if back-salting via FASA is involved (which, as previously mentioned, increases reactivity and decreases utility of petrochemical solvents). Even though many of us re-cycle solvents in new extractions, IME they don't pull nearly as many goodies as fresh solvent does

Long Shart Short, most of our fun-and-spunky psychedelic chemistry recipies generate litres upon litres of degraded solvent (ESPECIALLY SO WITH Mescaline because back-salting in NPS causes changes in structure of solvent === unknown reactivity === difficult, if not impossible, to re-purify safely & efficiently in one's kitchen === swimming pools of spent, degraded, super-toxic, super-carcinogenic, super-caustic, super-deadly, super-explosive/reactive petrochemical solvents left to deal with after the desired product is achieved and isolated, leaving the common man with no safe, legal, anonymous, environmentally-friendly and/or cost-effective methods by which to dispose of said highly toxic spent solvent other than through illicit dumping into the environment.

While I do not condone such activities (and currently have a cess pool of several gallons of spent/degraded xylene and naphtha from past extractions wafting around my backyard shed, collecting dust and taking up space which I do not want to flush down my toilet, nor throw into a random dumpster for fear of solvent contaminating sewage, ground-water, soil etc. via these similar such disposal methods) and advocate proper chemical disposal via private contractors as a means of waste disposal to others, I highly doubt my advice isn't even worth the time it takes to read/write this PSA in the first place. A great deal of clandestine kitchen-chemists I am acquainted with IRL have no moral/ethical concern whatsoever when it comes to haphazardly dumping their spent solvents & >>>14 PH solutions of hydroxide in a local forest, park, swamp or similar such area away from their neighborhood where others seldom traverse; the only folks I know of IRL who take out their trash in the ethical way are graduate-chemists with 24/7 carte-blanche access to the chemistry department's hazardous chemical disposal contractor/company (I have begun negotiations with one of them who seems to be OK regarding helping me safely dispose of spent solvents; things are looking up ATM, and I'm planning which plants I should grow/germinate in the freely liberated space these solvents have stewed about in for far too long).

There is a great big 800-kilogram ape haunting this thread: the specter imposed by the question as to how one should go about disposing of the spent, non-recyclable, non-polar phase of a standard A/B extraction. Hunting-out the services of a licensed hazardous chemical waste disposal company would exponentially increase the chance of being prosecuted for manufacture of a controlled/prohibited substance(s), a great big felony charge in most countries, which may bring with it a myriad of other possible charges as well (depending on what the police find when they raid your place with a search warrant in hand), alongside a spike in the stress level/paranoia of the disposer due to this possibility. Flushing litres of chemical waste down the drain or tossing it into a dumpster is analogous to dumping it into a nearby forest and proceeding to run like hell, praying that no one other than your conscience witnessed the deed; no matter how you try to justify your dirty deeds, so as long as the waste isn't disposed of via a legitimate chemical waste disposal company (which may rat you out to Big Brother, as well as take a good chunk of change out of your wallet for the dirty deed) or otherwise kept in your residence ad infinitum, the cost of your voyages through this sea of psychedelic pseudo-science and clandestine chemistry is a great big disservice to the good Earth--by blowing the doors of perception off their hinges with the power of chemistry, of using toxic reagents to create consciousness-combusting compounds--you are, have, or otherwise in one way or another will, be committing a treacherous act of eco-terrorism against the good of all mankind.

It's been eight long years of exponentially expanding interest in and demand for psychedelic compounds, with most consumers desiring them in quasi-pure form. Eight long years of ever-increasing production of said psychedelic compounds in the kitchens of millions of commoners world-wide, most of whom having no means for safe disposal of the spent solvents which yielded their sacraments; what shall we do about this exponentially expanding environmental travesty? How will we go about safely disposing of the super-toxic byproducts of our beloved 'Teks'? What Shall we do Now?

"Fortunately" most of these solvents are flammable which could be a clue to their effective disposal. I think the concerns about their stability and toxicity such as:

and

are somewhat overstated. They are clearly nowhere near as a toxic as plutonium or sarin, for example, and unless you've been acidifying with nitric or perchloric acid they're not strictly explosive. That's no excuse for irresponsible disposal, of course, and this concern is valid and relevant.

This post seems to point the way somewhat. A more prominent "safe disposal of solvents" thread would be pertinent, if one doesn't already exist.