PoorMansChemist

AgI cleaned of organics goop with ethyl acetate, THF, and IPA washes. 🥰

2 days ago |[YT] | 42

PoorMansChemist

Had to get a new hotplate. The old one died when I had a catastrophic accident with the cadmium acetate. I was trying to redissolve it and the beaker broke on the hotplate. 😳 That was fun to clean up. I didn't even try to salvage the hot plate it just went straight into the trash. The tray paid for itself by containing the spill. Those plastic safety tray thingies are so damn useful! Never work indoors without one!

We are ready to start tackling this silver mess. What you see in the picture is what I recovered. One batch is an older one I processed and is mostly silver metal (I think). The other two much uglier ones are mostly silver iodide that's heavily contaminated by organics and possibly silicone compounds. Calcination is out because silver iodide is volatile at high temperatures. Digestion in hot, conc HNO3 is an option. But we could also try a less aggressive approach and try to remove the organic crud using solvent washes. I think that might be worth a try. If we can remove any of this organic mess it would be helpful.

2 days ago |[YT] | 32

PoorMansChemist

Using iodide was a mistake. In theory it precipitates out more silver than the chloride does. But the difference is infinitesimal and not worth putting up with the headaches that I'm dealing with here. Maybe it works better if you're not trying to recover the silver from industrial waste which could contain any one of several hundred different compounds. The result of this is that the iodide merrily oxidizes to iodine and then reduces back to iodide again and then it reoxidizes to iodine and so on. This makes it very difficult to tell when the solution is dark because of iodine versus precipitated silver versus some other unknown component changing color. I think next time I'm just going to stick with the chloride. But now we know what happens when you try to recover silver from industrial waste using iodide. In hindsight I really should have predicted this would happen. But it didn't occur to me that it would be quite this difficult. Still we are soldiering on. 😁

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4 days ago |[YT] | 52

PoorMansChemist

Day 3 of processing silver waste. I am making a video on the process. I made a tweak to the process and drop the silver out of the iodide instead of the chloride. I don't know if that was the best decision but we're going to try it. It has been kind of fun watching the filtrate oxidize and reduce randomly as the different waste streams are combined. It goes black, it goes tan, it goes black again, it goes yellow, etc. Id cry about all the lost iodine but KI has become cheap and readily available on Amazon. Go figure. So its not quite the precious commodity it used to be. 🤷 Whats really funny is that if you buy it Amazon automatically recommends H3PO4 and H2O2. 😂😂 Cant imagine why people would be frequently buying those together.

1 week ago (edited) |[YT] | 50

PoorMansChemist

Our cadmium acetate solution is rapidly disappearing. Especially compared to the rate that it had been evaporating away/crystallizing at before. I guess when cadmium acetate decides to crystallize it does it all at once. This is actually kind of weird because mercuric acetate was not nearly this problematic. I think just like the lead acetate the problem comes down to a lack of excess acetic acid. It ends up forming basic acetates by reacting with ambient CO2. I think it also forms complexes with bridging acetates making it a coordination polymer. Thats why it goes so viscous. At least that's my current theory.

PS Much thanks to PhilouzLouis for his help with sorting out the crystallizing of these metal acetates! If you haven't seen this guy's comments you're missing something special. And extremely helpful. 🙂🙂🙂

1 week ago |[YT] | 43

PoorMansChemist

I fear that once the government cracks down on the fentanyl crossing the border this is going to become the next big thing. This is a prototypical nitazine mu-receptor full agonist that is somewhere between 1000 and 2000 times stronger than morphine or 10 to 20 times stronger than fentanyl. It's half life is even shorter than fentanyl's is clocking in at a mere hour and a half (give or take). All of this together should make the nitazines WILDLY addictive and dependence inducing! Some of these drugs like the one pictured are so strong and so simple to synthesize that it would not surprise me in the least if the cartels didn't move production into the US and switch to producing them instead of fentanyl. That would be kind of scary actually because these things are so potent they quality as bona fide chemical weapons. You'd need a space suit just to handle macroscopic amounts of the pure stuff! As usual when the government cracks down on one thing the thing that replaces it is FAR worse. People are already turning up dead from this stuff. So don't use street drugs, kids. You never know what you're going to get and reagent testing has become unreliable.

Synthesis scheme taken from "Landscaping the Nitazene Scaffold to Identify Novel Mu-Opioid Receptor Modulators: From Molecular Design and Chemical Synthesis to Pharmacological Profiling" (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6c00283)

1 week ago (edited) |[YT] | 99

PoorMansChemist

Lead(II) acetate spontaneously crystallizing. Like the cadmium acetate this has been going for several months. I don't know why these metal acetates behave this way but it can be very obnoxious. Just crystallize already for fuck's sake. 🙄

1 week ago |[YT] | 45

PoorMansChemist

Giant cadmium acetate crystal.

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1 week ago |[YT] | 45

PoorMansChemist

Looks like it's going to rain all weekend again. Naturally on the days I don't have to work a hurricane would hit. Typical. So we're going to work on that silver recycling video because I can do it indoors. 😁 I am thinking that this is going to be our next big purchase. We've needed one of these things for a very long time. The decent ones seem to be about $250. My car needs new brakes first. But I've already started a piggy bank for this. 🙂🙂

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1 week ago (edited) |[YT] | 17

PoorMansChemist

The moon in a very tight conjunction with Jupiter. This was taken at 05:30 on 10/6/26 in SC, USA.

2 weeks ago |[YT] | 41