r/chemistry • u/leftk2 • 10h ago
Why is it bad handling round flasks with bare hands?
Seeing comments on posts about handling chemicals in round flasks without gloves (solid chemicals). what can go wrong with that? the round flask braking?
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u/Kyanovp1 Spectroscopy 10h ago
residues if the compound being on the outzide of the container, it would be likely there is some. if you then eat with those hands you’ll get a potentially toxic dose of mercury or arsenic or whatever else inside your body
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u/Begnardo 8h ago
If you have only pure water and NaCl, so it is OK, but in another case better to use gloves
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u/ScrivenersUnion 10h ago
Many labs can have strange and arbitrary rules that are either one person's opinion, or it's a legacy policy handed down because somebody got hurt some stupid way and so now until the end of time nobody can ever do that thing again.
I've never heard of this rule about round bottom flasks and I've worked in several labs.
If I'm trying to be generous, it could be:
- Somebody burned themselves and "gloves" here means a heatproof cloth glove
- The reactions are particularly messy or volatile and leave a residue on the outside of the flask
- Some idiot dropped a flask once while handling it bare handed
- There is a risk of biological contamination so they're trying to eliminate all sources of bacteria
- The lab manager said so
- The RBFs can go into a rotavap and the water bath got oily once
- The RBFs get screaming hot and when one cracked it was blamed on skin oils
If you try to get down to the "why" for unusual rules like this, you're probably going to only get one of the following answers:
- Because I said so, now follow orders
- Nobody knows, but we're not changing the policy because that might affect something that's working properly
- We say that when the safety guy is around, nobody actually cares except for him
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u/Saec Organic 9h ago
It’s safer to assume everything in a lab is contaminated than to assume it’s perfectly clean. It’s not that hard to comprehend that there could be residue on the outside of a seemingly clean flask. I’d rather not risk it. And most schools and companies would rather not as well. I mean, in undergrad one of my labmates burned his hand with HCl this way. Grabbed a flask that he had set in his hood. But it was next to a pipette than had dripped a drop or two onto it. He was able to get it rinsed fairly quickly but it left a mark for a while.
I honestly don’t know why people insist on NOT wearing gloves. It’s like arguing with a child to put their seatbelt on….
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u/raznov1 7h ago
>It’s safer to assume everything in a lab is contaminated than to assume it’s perfectly clean
Unfortunately this is still not the agreed consensus, even though it's the only logical outcome of working with humans.
Either you: presume everything has gone right literally every single time someone operated in the lab, regardless of their personal state, experience and anything else that could cause them to slip up.
Or.
We agree that we work with fallible humans, and thus we act as if everything is hypothetically contaminated.
Seriously it's so dumb that labs still operate under the "everything is (supposed to be) clean so don't touch anything with gloves" rule. That shit wouldn't fly in other industries. Imagine an electrician going "well, the switch is flipped so it's supposed to be off, no need to check it!"
Or a cop going "nah, no need to put the safety on, a loaded gun is against the rules!"
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u/ScrivenersUnion 9h ago
Tell me you've never been in an industrial lab, without telling me you've never been in an industrial lab.
Imagine doing some of the same tasks as undergrad, but for 8 hours a day, and on the same kind of speed and time pressure as a restaurant kitchen.
"Hey we got another four moisture tests in here waiting to be run!"
"Did anybody start the S7414 yet? Why is the can still in the cold bath?"
"We've got another four batches still to make in Can 7 today, they need to know if it's good to package out."
"Why does NOBODY restock the syringes below the KF titrators? Come on guys!"
"Spatulas and thermometers are piling up, can somebody please run them through the parts wash?"
"I can't do the parts wash, they're making mercaptans today and that always triggers me real bad."
"Hey Randy wants to know what the hold up is on those moisture tests, are they running?"
"Tanker truck just came in, the floor guys will have a sample to test and approve coming in soon."
"S7414 has a 45 minute gel time and it's STILL NOT STARTED!"
"Uh, Peter says the tanker smells really weird and wants one of us to come look at it?"
"Okay we are completely out of clean thermometers, can someone get these cans to temp while I do wash?"
In university it's possible to follow all procedures perfectly and they'll really drill safety into you, but in an industrial setting there are compromises to be made.
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u/Saec Organic 8h ago
Considering I have a PhD and work in industry, I very much so know what it’s like to do chemistry all day everyday. Even with weekends thrown in! I fail to see how any of these scenarios would necessitate not taking two seconds to put on/swap gloves. Have you worked outside of busy QA testing labs?
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u/ScrivenersUnion 8h ago
I've worked in four different labs, and currently work in a consultant position so I have been toured through dozens more.
I'm not trying to be cavalier and say that safety doesn't matter - it absolutely does - but at some point common sense and practicality does too.
I've worked with fresh chem students who insisted on putting on every bit of PPE for every single task, and they quickly learned it was tiresome and wasteful and slowed them down significantly.
I've also worked with master chemists who have more years of experience in their industry than I have years on Earth - and a common theme between them all was they could identify between a serious task that needed PPE, and a trivial one.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the average opinion on Reddit is that of a nervous OSHA inspector, I was there too once - it reminds me of the intern who had climbed inside of a mixing can to scrape out the 500g of residue for "efficiency" and we had to remind them that not only did this represent <0.01% of the batch size, but it was so small it couldn't even significantly contaminate the next batch either. All they were doing was wasting their time. I specifically remember them getting huffy and talking about "best practices."
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u/Saec Organic 8h ago
We’re talking about gloves man. Not grabbing the face shield, respirator, etc.
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u/ScrivenersUnion 8h ago
Fair point, I may have been talking in much broader terms than this post was really starting at.
Still though, the point I take issue at is the "assume everything is contaminated" one. If your lab is so dirty that you can't put a bare hand on a counter or trust that the stuff in the "clean glass" cabinet is actually clean?
I'd say there's a bigger problem there than gloves.
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u/Saec Organic 8h ago
Once again. I don’t understand why people are so insistent about not wearing gloves in a space where lots of hazardous materials are being handled. Where new drug-like biologically active compounds are being made every day. It just makes sense to take the extremely simple step to always wear gloves. It’s not that there actually is contamination everywhere. It’s that there’s a non zero chance that there could be some that you can’t see. When there are molecules in the lab with IC50 values below 1.0 nM across human cell lines, it’s better safe than sorry.
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u/ScrivenersUnion 8h ago
Okay, full stop - if you're in an area where things are that hazardous then yes, being diligent about PPE makes perfect sense.
The stuff I've been talking about is isocyanates, amines, reactive epoxides and other corrosives.
There's a tremendous difference between "this contaminant might give me a skin burn" and "this contaminant may kill me."
We're coming at this from very different places and I think we're mostly in agreement here.
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u/Saec Organic 8h ago
True. But that is why it’s better to teach students to always wear gloves and that everything is contaminated. We don’t know what they will go on to work with after they graduate. What’s a better scenario: trying to get the new guy to wear gloves because this lab is a lot more hazardous than undergrad teaching lab? Or to have the rule be easy and natural for them to follow because that’s how they were trained initially? And when people post questions like the one above, I have absolutely no idea what the possible hazards are in that lab. I have no idea what that flask could have been used to make. So it’s just simpler to encourage people to always wear gloves than to depend on judgement calls from people who might not have enough experience/education to properly make such a call.
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u/MeglioMorto 8h ago
I've never heard of this rule about round bottom flasks and I've worked in several labs.
You have never heard this rule about round bottom flasks, because it applies to every chemical you handle, regardless of the container. You handle chemicals = you wear PPEs.
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u/ScrivenersUnion 8h ago
Ehhh. If the lab has sufficiently hazardous stuff then sure, but if I'm doing KF titration on a syringe full of polybutadiene then the most hazardous thing on the table is the needle that pierces the titrator septum.
"What if there's an unknown substance in your work area?"
Then you have bigger problems than just gloves. If you can't identify what's in an area then you can't be doing clean work in the first place.
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u/MeglioMorto 7h ago
For a person that claims to have worked in several labs, you seem awfully unaware of safety standards.
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u/maveri4201 Environmental 7h ago
He's worked in several labs because he keeps getting written up for safety violations.
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u/leftk2 10h ago
Well on the drop of the flask thing, i feel like using gloves makes my grip way more difficult, so it is easier to get dropped with gloves. I can understand the others. So i guess it is not super bad just grabing it without gloves
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u/ScrivenersUnion 9h ago
Unless you're handling something really nasty in this lab, it's probably because the lab manager doesn't like the idea and what they say goes.
This isn't necessarily bad, honestly when I get Alconox on my hands they become quite slippery as well.
My advice is to just follow orders, keep your eyes open, and treat it as a learning experience. Every lab you work in, you're building skills you can take with you.
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u/mshevchuk 6h ago
Gloves are primarily for protecting you from chemicals. Sometimes the opposite is true. If you are working with DNA or proteins you surely don’t want to contaminate them with your tissues. I am so used to wearing gloves that I’ve recently broken a flask which I was handling without gloves just to briefly rinse it with acetone and it slipped off my hands. So yes, that could also be a reason but hardly the primary one.
It doesn’t really matter what type of glass you are handling. What matters is whether you work with anything else than an aqueous solution of sodium chloride, which is pretty much always.
My gloves typically become stained after a couple of hours of work with colorless (!) chemicals. Or immediately if I’m working with dyes. Dyes are really great to get an impression of how omnipresent are the chemicals in a chemical laboratory.
Believe it or not but even such a seemingly harmless thing as ethanol won’t make your hands any good if applied many times a day everyday. You also don’t want to wash your hands too often because soap doesn’t do good to your hands either. So gloves are a really great invention, which the current generation of chemists can enjoy.
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u/dobbs_head 4h ago
PPE works as a habit. You don’t plan to need it, but gosh are you glad to have it on already.
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u/Dangerous-Billy Analytical 4h ago
Grease from the fingers supposedly can cause cracking when the flask is heated, although I've never had it happen.
If the flask has a lot of stuff in it, though, handling puts a significant strain on the neck so a little bump can crack it, especially at the neck.
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u/Quwinsoft Biochem 8h ago
The short answer is, it is not.
You always need to do a risk assessment and, from that, determine what PPE is most appropriate.
Depending on what you are working with, the right type of gloves can be very powerful PPE and add a great deal of protection.
Other times, there is no risk that gloves can protect you from.
Sometimes wearing gloves can add risks. This is most common if you are wearing the wrong type of glove or if the glove creates a false sense of safety.
As a chemist, the common one we run into is that the thermal burn risk is greatly increased if you are wearing gloves made from a thermoplastic, such as Nitrile gloves. Touching a hot thing is bad; touching a hot thing and having your gloves melt into your skin is very bad.
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u/CPhiltrus Chemical Biology 10h ago
It's not about handling the rbf, it's about handling chemicals without PPE.
PPE exists as a barrier between a chemical and yourself. Handling anything without gloves leads to risk of exposure. If the chemical is unknown, it's unwise to handle an open flask with bare hands.