further adventures in plastic degradation
Jan. 1st, 2006 03:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI opened the medicine cabinet in search of the Vicks goop. Something didn't look right. If my nose weren't stuffed up, and I hadn't been half asleep, I would probably have caught on sooner that something was starting to go wrong. I had a little container of eugenol in my medicine cabinet -- eugenol is the active ingredient in clove oil, and it numbs toothache pain. (It hurts gums, which makes it a bit risky. I used to apply it very carefully, with a q-tip.) It has a powerful clove-like smell. It's not bad, but it can be overwhelming in quantity. When my research group used eugenol as a polymer additive, my colleagues would sometimes end up with materials that stank spectacularly of rancid cloves. When the stuff went bad, it went really bad. People wandered in from other departments, asking cautiously, "that's not one of the products you're talking about selling, is it?" or sometimes "you're not planning to keep that, are you?" So I took a few mL home with me, thinking it wouldn't matter if they disposed of 5990mL instead of the intended 6L.
I put the eugenol in a little centrifuge tube, because we didn't have any other small containers with watertight lids. Think of a plastic tube with a screw cap, with a capacity of about 30mL. It doesn't have a flat base like a pill bottle. The bottom tapers to a point (so small amounts of sediment will be easier to see after centrifuging, though I didn't care about that application.) I kept it upside down, on the flat top, not wanting to bother with a holder that would accomodate the pointed end. And the stuff is so thick and oily...I didn't want to transfer it to another container and lose what would inevitably cling to the walls of the old tube. It's been in my medicine cabinet for almost 2 years, with the eugenol in contact with the plastic screw cap all the time. The last time I opened it, or even picked it up, was in March.
Tonight, the cap cracked. I didn't really study it ("you're not planning to keep that, are you?"), but a quick look suggested the liquid had eaten through the threaded part of the cap and was starting to ooze out. I caught it when it was just an annular puddle, well before the tube had emptied itself. I'm glad it hadn't progressed further, as the eugenol had gone bad when I wasn't smelling. My first big project for the year was to clean out the medicine cabinet and the sink. I had thought it would be good to do some housecleaning and closet rearranging today, but I was thinking of the DAY part of today.
ETA: There was a time I thought I was done, but I was only temporarily done, until the decongestants kicked in.
META: A medicine cabinet is a really bad place to keep medicine. I knew that. I was thinking of pills disintegrating in the damp. It's also a bad place to keep anything that might be sensitive to heat. Medicine cabinets attached to incandescent lights are especially bad for this.
YMETA: (private service announcement) It's more important to take the damn pills every day than to prolong their shelf life. If you're doing it right, you shouldn't have the bottle around much more than a month. So do what you need, to remember the things.
I put the eugenol in a little centrifuge tube, because we didn't have any other small containers with watertight lids. Think of a plastic tube with a screw cap, with a capacity of about 30mL. It doesn't have a flat base like a pill bottle. The bottom tapers to a point (so small amounts of sediment will be easier to see after centrifuging, though I didn't care about that application.) I kept it upside down, on the flat top, not wanting to bother with a holder that would accomodate the pointed end. And the stuff is so thick and oily...I didn't want to transfer it to another container and lose what would inevitably cling to the walls of the old tube. It's been in my medicine cabinet for almost 2 years, with the eugenol in contact with the plastic screw cap all the time. The last time I opened it, or even picked it up, was in March.
Tonight, the cap cracked. I didn't really study it ("you're not planning to keep that, are you?"), but a quick look suggested the liquid had eaten through the threaded part of the cap and was starting to ooze out. I caught it when it was just an annular puddle, well before the tube had emptied itself. I'm glad it hadn't progressed further, as the eugenol had gone bad when I wasn't smelling. My first big project for the year was to clean out the medicine cabinet and the sink. I had thought it would be good to do some housecleaning and closet rearranging today, but I was thinking of the DAY part of today.
ETA: There was a time I thought I was done, but I was only temporarily done, until the decongestants kicked in.
META: A medicine cabinet is a really bad place to keep medicine. I knew that. I was thinking of pills disintegrating in the damp. It's also a bad place to keep anything that might be sensitive to heat. Medicine cabinets attached to incandescent lights are especially bad for this.
YMETA: (private service announcement) It's more important to take the damn pills every day than to prolong their shelf life. If you're doing it right, you shouldn't have the bottle around much more than a month. So do what you need, to remember the things.
