Alternative for chloroform needed

There are various industrial solvents that are (at least) not CMR.
One source of advice, and perhaps of safe and suitable equipment for this application, could be manufacturers of vapour degreasing equipment. This comes in all sizes and doesn't usually appear in lab equipment catalogues. A bit of Googling gives some hits.
Regards
"oenpgroep" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com...

Try contacting Lisa Choplo at Miele Professional. She won't charge you anything. Her number is 800-843-7231.

Dichloromethane

Presumably you require an organic solvent that will dissolve the residues left on your glassware. My first choice would be acetone. It is cheap, has a high occupational exposure standard (1,210 mg.m-3), is a good all round solvent for most organics and as a bonus it is miscible with water. Therefore you could give the glassware a rinse with acetone, drain off the excess and then finish off with soap and water. An alternative to acetone is 2-butanone (methyl ethyl ketone).

both are extremely flammable. big bump in insurance rates.
i'd look really hard at a small vapor degreasing unit with CHCl3, if it works for you. the good news about vapor degreasing is that you use the same volume, over and over. a small degreaser (10L volume) may last you months before its contaminated enough to drum and legally dispose.

That was my first thought but they may be running PET viscosities and acetone would not be a good rinse. If that were the case, I would switch to TFA/methylene chloride as the IV solvent and rinse with methylene chloride. You'd have to recover everything anyway. Original post does not have adequate information. Frank

Frank is correct, they are not interested in simply cleaning but require a solvent for measuring IV. If the polymer is soluble, we use THF which we then recover, redistill and reuse. THF is a flammable but that shouldn't be a problem in a lab environment and certainly insurance wise shouldn't be an issue. The issue in Europe is probably Cl containing compounds, we can't use chloroform for anything in our European labs.

More likely the toxic effects of the chloroform isn't it ? Isn't chloroform a carcinogen ?
I have to admit, given that carbon tet and chloroform are carcinogenic (IIRC) it shouldn't be too long before methylene chlride is shown to be one too :)
Bruce
----------------------------------------------------------------------- It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone´s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me ? After all, I´m one of Us. I must be. I´ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We´re always one of Us. It´s Them that do the bad things. Terry Pratchett. Jingo.

"Bruce Sinclair" wrote in message news:09u1c.30641$ snipped-for-privacy@news02.tsnz.net... ACGIH, IARC, NIOSH and NTP all list methylene chloride as a carcinogen but OSHA TLV is 25 ppm. I also know of someone that got in a heap of trouble contaminating a landfill with it ;( Frank

(snip) Ah. Right (i need to keep up don't I :) ).
oops :)
Bruce
----------------------------------------------------------------------- It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone´s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me ? After all, I´m one of Us. I must be. I´ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We´re always one of Us. It´s Them that do the bad things. Terry Pratchett. Jingo.

Frank is not correct,
we are only looking for a rinsing chemical, as solvent for measuring IV we are using several solvents depending on polymer type and viscosity. For instance o-cresol for PET, formic acid for PA6, TCF/F for high cristalline PET. After dissolving the polymer in glassware and bringing the solution in the viscosity meter we clean our glassware with chloroform (also after the measurement the viscosity meters). So we use the chloroform only for rinsing.
We are looking for an alternative rinsing chemical, acetone is no option because the polymer will precipitate immediately and the cleaning of the glassware is much more difficult. So the chemical should not precipitate the residual polymer in the glassware.
At this moment the chloroform waste is transported to a recycling company and of course this isn't cheap. Dichloromethane is perhaps an option, but are there perhaps others?
thanks oenpgroep

No - look at my original suggestion - I am correct. I assumed there was a polymer precipitation problem, that you were testing PET and acetone would precipitate it. Not sure why you are using 2 solvents for PET. We routinely used trifluoroacetic acid/methylene chloride for all types PET. Then you can rinse with methylene chloride and recover both solvents. Frrank