Say I have an acidic waste I need to neutralize to precipitate metals from solution, I will use my caustic waste and mix these together, this brings down the pH of my caustic waste, and raises the pH of my acidic waste, in the right combination all I would use is waste to treat waste (although I do generate more acidic waste and still some addition of base to neutralize.
I will also use a highly acid waste to remove base metals.
It is hard to explain but you can move waste from one bucket to another and dissolve powders you wish to remove, say I have a bucket of copper and Iron powder that may be somewhat caustic, I can use a batch of fresh acidic waste to dissolve some iron from these powders, the caustic powders will raise the pH of this acidic waste, saving me on caustic soda later, I can also use electrolysis or cementing with a metal like iron to remove the copper from solution, leaving an iron waste solution and copper powder for cementing values from a solution.
Say I make nitric acid with a nitrate salt and sulfuric acid, I have no waste (nitric acid is used),the salts of sodium or potassium bi sulfate is used for other processes like making ferrous sulfate to test and precipitate gold.
Everyone should read this, Butcher, you are the best. Thank you for all your time and valuable information. I think this should be posted somewhere as a tutorial for people to see :lol:
Say I dissolve silver chloride in an ammonia solution and the precipitate it with HCl, no waste silver chloride is used, and the ammonium chloride solution is made into crystals for a reagent.
Say I have to evaporate an aqua regia solution the gas can be bubbled into another solution I wish to dissolve metals from.
Say I have some copper chloride solution that I have used to dissolve iron, now I have copper I chloride powders and an iron chloride solution, this iron chloride I may evaporate down, add some H2SO4, drive off HCl gas (recovered bubbling into water to form acid), then the ferrous sulfate is evaporated to crystallize, dissolved and re-crystallized for purity and bottled for use.
Say I have those red brown fumes from dissolving silver in nitric acid, bubbling those NO2 fumes into water with a few drops of peroxide will make nitric acid which can be concentrated with careful evaporation, why scrub a perfectly useful gas?
get the idea?
Basically do not look at your waste as waste until it is actually not useful to you, but look to see if there is a useful byproduct in the reaction.