[Jewelry making - Article 00062] - Re: [Orchid] silver soldering and acids

[Peter W. Rowe]

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>        Since it's come up about the toxicity of Sparex.....does
>     anyone know how long you can use the same batch of Sparex 

    Use it till it stops adaquately dissolving the flux and oxides,
    or is so saturated with copper that you have a hard time keeping
    it from plating out with copper, or until the pickle pot is so
    grungy looking that you can't stand it anymore and just HAVE to
    clean the sucker out.  

>       and the safest way to dispose of the Sparex when one can no
>     longer use it?? 

    dilute it with ordinary water and flush it if you're connected
    to a municipal sewer.  Small amounts are not going to harm
    anything at all in the environment. In a small closed system like
    a septic tank, you might slow down the tank process, so that's
    not a good place to put it.    If you're worried, though, you
    could always just let the pot boil dry, scrape the solids into
    whatever's handy, and take it to whatever local facility handles
    out of the ordinary waste materials.  For what it's worth, some
    types of hardware store drain cleaner are often a dilute
    sulphuric acid.  This is no worse, though as a depleted salt,
    less effective as a drain cleaner.  About the only concern might
    be the small amount of dissolved copper, and you're putting into
    the environment with your pickle, a lot less copper than in a
    single penny dropped in the river...  About all it might do is
    briefly slow down the amount of algae growing in your sewer
    lines...  while large users of the stuff need to be more
    careful, we're not generally talking about a polluting or toxic
    waste here.  Just a mild acid compound that's already common and
    naturally occurring in the environment, and which will cause your
    city sewage disposal system no harm or problem in the small
    amounts invovled here. 

Peter Rowe

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