formaldehyde

[reor]

So, i pickled that melon and i got some formaldehyde left; (semicolon valid?) approximately 500 ml. What'd be a productive way to maluse it? What else can i do with it?

[reor]

Anyone? Otherwise i'd have the problem of disposing it.

[Mokele]

I'll take it, I need some more formaldehyde for my specimens. Out of curiousity, where did you get it, anyway?

 

Mokele

[YT2095]

yeah, I wouldn`t mind a little either if Mokele doesn`t mind sharing

[woelen]

Shipping formaldehyde internationally is a pain in the ass. I would never ship such a nasty substance by airmail and I even would be very hesitant to have it shipped by a normal postage service within the coutry where I live. Formaldehyde is a carcinogen and it is severely irritating and makes the skin brittle.

 

Mokele, if you really want formaldehyde, then order some paraformaldehyde. That is a solid, which can be added to water and heated and then decomposes to formaldehyde. Para-formaldehyde also is quite nasty, but it is much less hazardous in shipping and there are companies in the US/Canada who are selling that online and are willing to ship this to individuals in Northern-America. If you wish, PM me for more info, I do not write the address over here.

 

YT, sorry for you, but my source will not ship it to you in the UK, unless you pay outrageous hazmat fees (I think it starts at $ 150).

[YT2095]

worst comes to worst, I could even make my own from Hexamine

[Mokele]

Ahh, drat. Well, I've found a place online thanks to that other tread that'll get me some more easily.

 

Mokele

[jdurg]

Formaldehyde is indeed horribly nasty stuff. As a senior (or was it sophomore?) in high school I was in my biology/anatomy class and we were disecting a giant clam. (A clam that is the size of a dinner plate). Anyway, my teacher at the time was a very old school individual. He didn't believe in the new preservatives and didn't feel like replacing his entire stock of specimens. So everything we had was still preserved in high percentage formaldehyde solutions.

 

Anyway, we were disecting the clam and thankfully I was wearing my safety goggles. I was standing near the mouth of the clam (didn't know it) when my lab partner did something that compressed the stomach of the clam. A giant stream of formaldehyde shot out of the clam and right onto my face. At first I was completely stunned. I couldn't believe what just happened. I went over to the sink and used a paper towel to wipe the still dripping CH2O off of my face. I then took my goggles off and rinsed my face in a stream of water and dried it. A little while later, my face started itching really badly and I scratched the itchy skin only to see sheets of dead skin fall off of my face. My skin was bright red and raw for weeks and itched like hell. Thankfully, it never scarred and I wiped all the formaldehyde off ASAP. Still, it was probably one of the worst chemical incidents I've ever had.

 

Also, formaledhyde is why methanol is so toxic. Methanol itself is relatively non-toxic. It's similar to ethanol but will make you intoxicated far more quickly and far more intensely. The problem is that your body metabolized CH3OH into CH2O so you wind up with formaldehyde created inside your body. It is the formaldehyde that goes on to kill you, not the methanol. In all alcoholic beverages there is a measureable amount of methanol. In your body, the alcohol dehydrogenase molecule prefers ethanol over methanol so the ethanol is metabolized while the methanol is excreted. Treatment for suspected methanol ingestion is an addition of ethanol into your system.