B/R Histology and Solvent Recycling Blog

You’ve been using xylene for years and now you are thinking about recycling it. Great idea. It’s expensive to buy and to dispose of. It doesn’t take a lot of training or special knowledge to recycle xylene. But for those who are curious about the details of xylene recycling anyway, this post is for you.

You’ve been using formalin for years and now you are thinking about recycling it. Great idea. In most places formalin isn’t too expensive. But it is expensive to dispose of. Or maybe you are dumping it down the drain and are worried about the backlash if people find out.

Solvent recycling in our lab? Sounds great but can’t somebody else do it for us? A growing trend in hospitals is for Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) to recycle solvents for the Histology laboratory.

Labs spend significant sums on buying and disposing of histology solvents. Unseen to most, are the regulatory costs of complying with local and federal hazardous waste regulations. The more hazardous waste your facility generates, the greater the regulations.

You’ve been using alcohol for years and now you are thinking about recycling it. Great idea. You use a lot of alcohol and it would be good to save money by buying less. It doesn’t take a lot of training or special knowledge to recycle alcohol. But for those who are curious about the details of alcohol recycling anyway, this post is for you.

If you need consistent, high quality recycled solvents, you need fractional distillation. The good solvent and the contaminants have different boiling points. By paying attention to the boiling point (vapor temperature) you can separate the good (clean solvent) from the bad (contaminants).

With a 20 liter (5 gallon) recycler you can easily recycler 5000 to 10000 liters (1300 to 2700 gallons) of solvent in a year. Typical operating costs to recycle 10000 liters of solvent would be about $200, or about $0.02 USD per liter ($0.07 USD per gallon).