Latest / Stereo Chemistry / C&EN Uncovered: Solvent Waste Levels, EPA Regulations, and Disposal

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C&EN Uncovered: Solvent Waste Levels, EPA Regulations, and Disposal · Stereo Chemistry

• 0:00
  Craig Bettenhausen: Craig, welcome to CNN uncovered. I'm
• 0:07
  Craig bednhausen. Cn yn uncovered is a podcast series
• 0:10
  from stereo chemistry. In each episode, we'll take another look
• 0:13
  at a recent cover story in chemical and Engineering News
• 0:16
  and hear from CNN reporters about striking moments from
• 0:18
  their reporting, their biggest takeaways and what got left on
• 0:21
  the cutting room floor. In this episode, we're talking about
• 0:24
  solving wastes their disposal and a new rule passed by EPA in
• 0:27
  April to regulate them, on average, from 2011 to 2021
• 0:32
  academic labs generated around 4300 metric tons of hazardous
• 0:36
  waste each year. More than half of that waste ends up burned in
• 0:40
  a pair of stories that appeared in the July 15 print issue of
• 0:43
  CNN, today's guests looked at the consequences of the new EPA
• 0:46
  regulations and what solutions academic institutions are coming
• 0:49
  up with to accommodate we'll put a link in the show notes to
• 0:53
  those stories. I'm here with CNN policy reporters crystal Vazquez
• 0:56
  and Lee creechburner, who wrote the articles. Hi, Crystal and
• 0:59
  Lee.
• 1:00
  Leigh Boerner: Hi, hello. So
• 1:04
  Craig Bettenhausen: starting off with Lee, for anyone that hasn't
• 1:05
  had a chance to read the article yet, can you give a brief recap
• 1:08
  of what it's about?
• 1:10
  Leigh Boerner: My story is based on data from hazardous waste
• 1:14
  shipping reports. I wanted to find out how much solvent waste
• 1:18
  academic labs used. I wrote a story about doing organic
• 1:24
  chemistry in water last year. One of the people that is pretty
• 1:27
  prominent in that area is Bruce Lipschitz. He's at UC Santa
• 1:30
  Barbara. He said to me at one point that what kind of got him
• 1:36
  going on, trying to get away from using organic solvents, was
• 1:40
  that he made so much waste that basically his environmental
• 1:44
  health and safety guy at UC Santa Barbara was like, You are
• 1:47
  the biggest hazardous waste producer in the whole county.
• 1:51
  And so he was like, oh, shoot, I better stop that. But then that
• 1:54
  made me think, well, how much was he making? And then how much
• 1:58
  do labs make? And so this story is me trying to figure out the
• 2:01
  answer to that question. I gathered publicly available
• 2:04
  government data and analyzed it to find out what kind of waste
• 2:11
  academic labs were making and what happened to it. Basically,
• 2:16
  what I found was most of the waste that comes out of academic
• 2:19
  labs is solvent, and most of that waste does end up burned,
• 2:24
  so some of it ends up in an incinerator that just burns it
• 2:28
  and it goes up into the air, but some of it also ends up being
• 2:31
  used as fuel for cement kilns. So it's also burned, but then
• 2:36
  it's used to actually power the cement kiln. So that is
• 2:39
  different than an incinerator. So
• 2:41
  Craig Bettenhausen: an incinerator is burning it just
• 2:43
  to get rid of it, yep. Whereas a cement kiln or another
• 2:46
  cogeneration plant is both getting rid of it but also using
• 2:49
  it as fuel, right?
• 2:50
  Leigh Boerner: And I wouldn't say getting rid of it, you know,
• 2:51
  it's just changing form, right?
• 2:53
  Craig Bettenhausen: That's true. Yeah. So in the article, you
• 2:55
  showed that the amount of annual waste generated by these
• 2:59
  academic institutions, which was, you know, more than 4300
• 3:02
  metric tons is nearly equal to the weight of seven fully loaded
• 3:06
  Airbus A 380 aircrafts. Yeah. How is that even possible? I
• 3:10
  know I used a lot of solvent when I was in the lab, but that
• 3:12
  just seems like so much.
• 3:14
  Leigh Boerner: Well, I mean, there are a lot of academic labs
• 3:16
  in the United States, and we did just look in the United States,
• 3:19
  so we don't have, at least, I didn't have, for this article,
• 3:24
  data from, you know, Europe, South America, China, other
• 3:27
  places in the world. So just that. But some labs use a lot of
• 3:32
  waste. I mean, can you think of, you know, your regular old
• 3:36
  organic chemistry, synthetic organic chemistry lab, even if
• 3:39
  it's like on the small side, maybe you have 10 graduate
• 3:42
  students, and you have a few postdocs and maybe a scientist
• 3:44
  or two. How often are those people running columns? That's
• 3:47
  what a lot of the solvent comes from, but it's also comes from,
• 3:50
  you know, running reactions and things like that. And then, you
• 3:52
  know, you rotovap it off, and you put it in your solvent waste
• 3:56
  container, and then you take it down to EH and S, whenever they
• 3:59
  collect it, and then it kind of disappears. But as far as you're
• 4:02
  concerned, it disappears. You know, as far as the atmosphere
• 4:05
  goes, it does not disappear.
• 4:08
  Craig Bettenhausen: So one of the big solvents, a lot of
• 4:09
  organic labs, is also one that's recently come under some
• 4:12
  specific EPA scrutiny. Crystal. I think you're gonna be the
• 4:15
  expert on this. Tell us about your part of the cover package.
• 4:18
  Krystal Vasquez: So my story focuses on recent EPA regulation
• 4:22
  that was finalized the end of April of this year, and
• 4:26
  basically the EPA banned most uses of methylene chloride,
• 4:30
  which is more commonly known as dichloromethane, in labs, the
• 4:33
  EPA is requiring them to do this workplace chemical safety
• 4:37
  protection plan, one of the big things that academic labs and
• 4:41
  EHS professionals were saying in public comments before this was
• 4:44
  finalized, that this would create a lot of havoc and a lot
• 4:48
  of extra work for them, and might end up affecting the use
• 4:51
  of DCM or dichloromethane or mesenchyroid in the labs
• 4:55
  overall. I think larger universities are going to be.
• 5:00
  Cost effective. The problem comes when you look at smaller
• 5:03
  universities that have limited staff and limited financial
• 5:06
  resources and will probably have to outsource a lot of this
• 5:09
  exposure monitoring. And so a lot of the people I talked to
• 5:12
  from those schools were saying that they will likely have to
• 5:15
  get rid of DCM in their labs. It's a big unfolding story. The
• 5:21
  one thing
• 5:21
  Craig Bettenhausen: I want to understand a little bit these
• 5:23
  changes from EPA. Are they changes in how people are
• 5:26
  handling the solvents, or is it mostly a change in paperwork?
• 5:30
  Krystal Vasquez: I would say that it leans towards a change
• 5:32
  in paperwork for research labs. Specifically, it's requiring
• 5:36
  basically and a plan to talk about what you would do in case
• 5:40
  of exposure, they're setting new exposure limits. You need to set
• 5:44
  up a regulated area, and so you need to talk about that in your
• 5:47
  documentation. Again, the biggest thing is the exposure
• 5:50
  monitoring, which is also technically on the side of
• 5:54
  paperwork, but it does require actual labor from the
• 5:57
  researchers and H and S staff to actually get that set up.
• 6:00
  Craig Bettenhausen: And you know, from EPA is the big
• 6:02
  concern here environmental impact or human health exposure.
• 6:07
  Krystal Vasquez: The main thing that the EPA is focusing is the
• 6:09
  human health impact. So DCM has a lot of health effects. It's
• 6:15
  carcinogen, and it has caused the death of people who have
• 6:19
  used it, typically for consumer use, but it does have that
• 6:22
  potential health effect. So they're hoping that with these
• 6:25
  new protection programs that the EPA is setting up that it will
• 6:30
  reduce the likelihood of those things happening, but it does
• 6:33
  have consequences in terms of like actually setting up those
• 6:36
  plans and making sure that it doesn't necessarily interfere
• 6:40
  with the research.
• 6:44
  Craig Bettenhausen: So I have a very personal interest in this,
• 6:46
  because when I was in the lab, I was the person who was in charge
• 6:49
  of going down to the central room and refilling drums from a
• 6:52
  giant drum. And for me, that was like literally sitting on top of
• 6:57
  a 55 gallon drum of dichloromethane, pumping it into
• 7:00
  a smaller bottle. How dangerous is dichloromethane exposure? I
• 7:07
  think for a lot of chemists in our audience, they've been
• 7:10
  exposed to a lot.
• 7:11
  Krystal Vasquez: I think that if you're using it the way you're
• 7:14
  supposed to, in a fume hood with the right PPE and all of that,
• 7:18
  your exposure should be smaller than if you were saying using
• 7:22
  Bethlehem chloride for like, a paint thinner, it used to be in
• 7:26
  paint thinners until not too long ago. I don't know how to
• 7:29
  answer that exactly, but I do think that, like academic labs
• 7:34
  and research labs in general, are very unique places that have
• 7:37
  a lot of different control methods and a lot of safety
• 7:40
  protocols set up. So, yeah, I would say that if you're
• 7:43
  following your Chemical Hygiene plan, that an EHS person has set
• 7:48
  out with their expertise, that you should be fine. I think that
• 7:52
  what the EPA wants is just to lower those exposure limits so
• 7:57
  that you're just even safer. You know?
• 7:59
  Leigh Boerner: I mean, I would say that it's really, really
• 8:02
  difficult to figure out an individual's risk from that just
• 8:10
  because of what Krista was saying, like, how are you using
• 8:12
  it as your hood on, how much are you using it, blah, blah, blah.
• 8:16
  I mean, for me, when I was in graduate school, dichloromethane
• 8:20
  was one of the few things that my molecules would go into,
• 8:25
  because I made kind of big molecules, and sometimes they
• 8:28
  had metals in them, and so I went through a ton of
• 8:31
  dichloromethane, and it was the same for a lot of people in my
• 8:35
  lab. I can't imagine not being able to use dichloromethane. It
• 8:39
  would really, it would have really messed up my research.
• 8:42
  Personally, one source
• 8:44
  Krystal Vasquez: I talked to said it's basically a whole
• 8:46
  paper's worth of research to try and find a different solvent for
• 8:48
  a reaction. So this is going to take, like, hours and hours and
• 8:52
  hours of work for these researchers who are either
• 8:55
  voluntarily choosing to get rid of DCM from their labs or are
• 8:58
  being forced to by the circumstances of their
• 9:01
  institution.
• 9:02
  Craig Bettenhausen: And deckler, methane is kind of a superstar
• 9:05
  solvent in some labs, but it's just one of several solvents.
• 9:08
  And Lee, your story looked at a much larger category of solvents
• 9:13
  in a chemistry lab, it feels like you go through a ton, like
• 9:16
  literally hauling these things in and out of the lab by the
• 9:18
  drum. But how do the volumes used in research labs compare
• 9:22
  with the volumes used in industrial applications, and is
• 9:25
  it for the same kinds of uses? Well,
• 9:30
  Leigh Boerner: an industrial lab and an academic research lab are
• 9:33
  very, very different places. I will say that just for my own
• 9:38
  sake, I was curious about All right, so, you know, we figured
• 9:42
  out, you know, this hazardous waste that's coming out of
• 9:45
  academic labs. How does it compare to the entire amount of
• 9:50
  waste, like from a particular year? And it was very, very
• 9:55
  small. It was 0.005% Yeah. In 2021
• 10:01
  Krystal Vasquez: Okay,
• 10:02
  Leigh Boerner: so that is, like, I don't know what's smaller than
• 10:05
  a drop in the bucket, a nano drop in a mega bucket. So it is
• 10:10
  a tiny, tiny amount. But what the important part is, according
• 10:18
  to Adelina vuckova, who is the director of the ACS Green
• 10:24
  Chemistry Institute. When I told her the numbers, she was like,
• 10:27
  Okay, well, but then she also said, Well, what's important
• 10:31
  here is teaching graduate students how to sub in different
• 10:39
  solvents, so it's not necessarily the total amount
• 10:44
  that academic labs are making. It is the learning process that
• 10:49
  students are going through. Because, you know, when those
• 10:53
  students graduate, when they leave, they're going to
• 10:55
  industry, you know, they're going to teach their own
• 10:58
  academic lab. They're going on to other places, and many people
• 11:04
  hope, including a lot of people in industry, that they will take
• 11:07
  this kind of knowledge with them and then apply it
• 11:09
  Craig Bettenhausen: later on. I guess there's industrial labs
• 11:12
  and there's also like industrial scale synthesis.
• 11:16
  Leigh Boerner: Yes, what I'm speaking of is industrial scale
• 11:18
  synthesis, not necessarily like a research lab. But you know,
• 11:23
  the part that actually starts making the drugs and scales
• 11:26
  these reactions up, you know, huge, huge amounts when they
• 11:29
  have to make huge, huge amounts of drugs, right? And so that's
• 11:32
  where the volume comes in with halogenated solvents. You know,
• 11:36
  what is the fate of some of this waste? 28.32% is incinerated.
• 11:41
  18.97% is used for fuel blending. That means that it's
• 11:46
  used to basically power cement kiln, and 45.83% is bulked.
• 11:53
  Yeah,
• 11:53
  Craig Bettenhausen: I saw the word bulked in your story, and I
• 11:57
  read it a couple times, and still it's a strange phrase. It
• 12:00
  seems like it's an ambiguous term all by itself.
• 12:05
  Leigh Boerner: Yeah, it's completely ambiguous. Because
• 12:07
  what does that mean? It basically means that companies
• 12:10
  that deal with the hazardous waste, they take waste from
• 12:17
  different sources. So that means that this school gave this here,
• 12:22
  that one across town made this much. They basically combine it
• 12:26
  and put it in a bigger bucket, say, like a tanker car or
• 12:30
  something like that. As far as what I've been looking at, which
• 12:34
  is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, data RCRA is what
• 12:41
  they call it. According to the rickra manifests, that's kind of
• 12:45
  the end of the road, as far as what you can see. But that goes
• 12:50
  on to be either incinerated or used for fuel blending or etc,
• 12:55
  etc, somewhere else. So that means that as far as my analysis
• 13:00
  of this data goes, What's being burned, either incinerated or as
• 13:05
  fuel, is more than what I'm able to pull out. So
• 13:12
  Craig Bettenhausen: crystal, the EPA, banned a lot of uses of
• 13:14
  dichloromethane a few years ago. Paint strippers is the example
• 13:17
  that a lot of people know of and that we covered. How does this
• 13:20
  new ban differ from the older ban. Yeah,
• 13:23
  Krystal Vasquez: so the initial ban was just paint strippers, I
• 13:26
  believe commercial use paint strippers. This time, they've
• 13:30
  kind of made it more comprehensive. So they've banned
• 13:33
  all consumer uses of DCM, and most commercial and industrial
• 13:38
  uses of DCM, with the exception of, I believe, 30, which
• 13:43
  includes using it as a laboratory chemical.
• 13:45
  Craig Bettenhausen: And this isn't even the first time that
• 13:47
  we've taken some solvents, specific solvents, out of a
• 13:50
  organic chemistry labs, right? This isn't your story. There's
• 13:52
  some other previous solvents that used to be used a lot, and
• 13:55
  now they're not right,
• 13:56
  Krystal Vasquez: right? Benzene is, I believe, one of the
• 13:58
  biggest examples, and one that I heard about repeatedly. Benzene
• 14:02
  used to be ubiquitous in the lab, and now it's not used as
• 14:06
  widely anymore. So I think the general consensus that I reached
• 14:10
  in my story was that it is possible to reduce the use of
• 14:15
  DCM despite how popular it is right now, I think it's just
• 14:19
  going to take a lot of work and a lot of rethinking of reactions
• 14:23
  and rethinking what your chemistry needs, and also
• 14:27
  rethinking the different hazards that you have to like balance
• 14:31
  out as you're deciding which solvents to use in your
• 14:34
  chemistry.
• 14:35
  Craig Bettenhausen: So reducing solvent waste is a big part of
• 14:38
  green chemistry. It's it's in more than one of the original 12
• 14:41
  principles of green chemistry, which was published about 25
• 14:44
  years ago. This far into that movement, how much progress has
• 14:48
  been made and what's coming down the pike. As far as new
• 14:52
  approaches to these solvents, there
• 14:54
  Leigh Boerner: are other solvents that you can use that
• 14:57
  are a little bit more eco for. Friendly, like, I don't know one
• 15:02
  called the universal solvent water. It is difficult to use
• 15:07
  water for some types of reactions, but, you know,
• 15:11
  there's a lot of research going on into doing chemistry and
• 15:15
  water. There's also been a lot of research into what makes a
• 15:20
  more environmentally friendly solvent. GCI has actually a
• 15:26
  guide on replacing your solvents with greener alternatives.
• 15:30
  There's a lot of research into going, Okay, I need a solvent
• 15:34
  that does X. Look at this table, okay, these types of solvents do
• 15:38
  X. Maybe I can use one of those instead. So that's kind of where
• 15:42
  it is. I
• 15:43
  Krystal Vasquez: think one thing that's important to point out
• 15:46
  is, regardless of whether you're replacing a solvent because of
• 15:48
  regulation or to try and get a greener solvent, you have to
• 15:51
  really think about the potential health effects and the safety
• 15:55
  issues that come with it. So one thing that I found in my story
• 15:59
  that some people are concerned about is that in order to
• 16:02
  replace DCM, they might end up replacing it with a solvent that
• 16:06
  has different hazards, so maybe it could cause lab explosions,
• 16:09
  or maybe it's another solvent or another compound that might be
• 16:13
  on EPA list. So I think that's just something to keep in mind
• 16:17
  as people are doing their lid searches, is to really do their
• 16:20
  homework and make sure that they're not replacing one
• 16:24
  solvent with something that could be worse another way, you
• 16:27
  know, yeah,
• 16:27
  Craig Bettenhausen: the old regrettable substitution. So is
• 16:34
  there anything else in either or both of your stories as you
• 16:37
  worked on this that you thought was really interesting and just
• 16:39
  didn't make it into the written piece. One
• 16:41
  Krystal Vasquez: thing that came up a few times, and I didn't get
• 16:44
  to include it, was the worry that dichloromethane is going to
• 16:47
  get more expensive because of this regulation, because the
• 16:51
  manufacturers are also they have to comply with this regulation
• 16:55
  as well. And so I haven't looked into where DCM is produced, or,
• 17:01
  like, how much of it is US based? But I think there was
• 17:03
  definitely concern amongst academics talking about, like,
• 17:07
  is this going to cost me more, and if I'm at a small school,
• 17:09
  will I be able to afford it, regardless of if we can set up
• 17:12
  the monitoring program and do all the other things with the
• 17:15
  workplace chemical protection program, something
• 17:18
  Leigh Boerner: else crystal that I wondered about too, is okay,
• 17:22
  you say, maybe small schools just might have to say, Okay, we
• 17:25
  just can't use it, because we can't keep up. We can't, you
• 17:29
  know, have somebody dedicated to just like, figuring out these
• 17:32
  regulations. Is that going to affect the recruitment for
• 17:35
  professors? So you think, you know, professors, like, uses a
• 17:40
  lot of DCM for their research. I'm not going to go work at this
• 17:44
  school. They say, I can't use DCM. I'm going to go work at
• 17:46
  this other school. I
• 17:48
  Krystal Vasquez: couldn't really gather how much of an impact it
• 17:51
  would have like on student recruitment. I think that when
• 17:55
  you work at a primarily undergraduate institution or
• 17:59
  other liberal arts schools that you are competing with, bigger
• 18:04
  schools in general. So that competition is always going to
• 18:06
  be there. So I don't necessarily know if this is going to add to
• 18:09
  it, but it could be just another factor of like, if someone wants
• 18:12
  to do a very specific type of chemistry that needs DCM, they
• 18:17
  might end up going to another school. So
• 18:20
  Craig Bettenhausen: Lee, what about you?
• 18:21
  Leigh Boerner: I have a whole section of data that did not
• 18:24
  make it into the story, and that is on specific
• 18:29
  Craig Bettenhausen: schools are we going to get in? We're going
• 18:31
  to name names.
• 18:33
  Leigh Boerner: One thing you'd have to remember is, the bigger
• 18:36
  the school, the more students it has, the more waste it's going
• 18:40
  to make, if you're talking about, you know, academic, lab
• 18:43
  research, just for instance, in 2021 the biggest producer of
• 18:49
  hazardous waste was the University of California, San
• 18:52
  Diego, and that was 142.35 metric tons. And then the next
• 18:58
  one on the list is the University of Michigan, at
• 19:00
  around 100 tons. So that's a pretty big jump. But the other
• 19:05
  kind of interesting thing about this data is that sometimes the
• 19:10
  same schools are at the top, and then one year, it won't appear
• 19:13
  in the top 20 at all.
• 19:16
  Craig Bettenhausen: Well, Crystal and Lee, thanks for
• 19:18
  diving deep on this with us. There's a lot here, and I
• 19:20
  enjoyed reading the stories and enjoyed
• 19:22
  Leigh Boerner: talking with you about it. Thanks a lot. Craig.
• 19:24
  Yeah, thanks. So
• 19:25
  Craig Bettenhausen: people can find me on social media, as at
• 19:27
  Craig of waffles, and in most places, where can they find you
• 19:30
  all,
• 19:30
  Leigh Boerner: I am on Twitter or x or whatever, formerly known
• 19:35
  that thing at Lee JK Berner. I am on mastodon. I don't remember
• 19:41
  what the heck it is. You can find me on LinkedIn, but I went
• 19:44
  over there birds homing pigeons will find me. You just have to
• 19:50
  know what kind of treats to get them. But I do have cats. They
• 19:53
  might have contact.
• 19:54
  Krystal Vasquez: I am occasionally on Twitter, slash x
• 19:57
  at caffeinated Chris the last. It's called K, R, y, s, and I am
• 20:03
  on blue sky at K desk. You can find me there. Well,
• 20:07
  Craig Bettenhausen: you can find crystal and Lee's cover stories
• 20:09
  about solvent wastes and the EPA updated regulations around
• 20:13
  methylene chloride on CNNs website, or in the July 15 print
• 20:17
  issue of CNN, we put links in the show notes along with the
• 20:20
  episode credits. If you'd love to know what you think of CNN
• 20:22
  uncovered, you can share your feedback with us by emailing
• 20:25
  cenfeedback@acs.org This has been cn uncovered, a series from
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  published by the American Chemical Society. Thanks for
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  listening. Bye.