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Hello! I am Looking for Information on Recovering Acetone.

1999

My company uses acetone ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] Warning! highly Flammable! for paint clean-up (the pressure pots, hoses and guns), and also some times for part degreasing prior to paint. We use it as a diluent or reduction solvent in one of our commercial epoxies, but not in most of our paints. I will continue to use virgin acetone ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] Warning! highly Flammable! in the rare cases where it is actually added to the coating.

We use about 1200 gallons of acetone a month. We are paying about $2.50 a gallon to purchase it, but since we use a strontium zinc dust ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] er, disposing of it after contamination is expensive, (it has to be treated as a hazardous waste).

Is there a simple way to filter out the solids and get the acetone clean enough to reuse for cleaning the paint equipment without distillation? Is there a way to get it clean enough to degrease parts prior to painting? Maybe a settling tank would be better than filtration?

I know that acetone is very volatile, and extremely dangerous because of its flammability, there would probably be considerable evaporation during a treatment process.

Maybe the right answer is to find a new equipment cleaning solvent blend.

Any ideas, thoughts or comments would be much appreciated.

Thank you,

Kelly Jones Draper, Engineer
- West Plains, Mo.

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Hi Kelly, While I don't have any suggestions on how to clean the acetone, I do have a suggestion on disposal of it. Check out the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commissions homepage.(www.tnrcc.tx.state) They have a great program called RENEW (Resource Exchange Network for Eliminating Waste) Their catalog has a Materials wanted section and there are several ads looking for acetone. Just a thought.

Kitt Daly
GTI Coatings, Inc. - Austin, Texas
1999

I have seen ads for distillation equipment. These are commercially available and are in use for separating acetone from oils and other volatile organics. Also, there are companies that provide recycling services.

Mandar Sunthankar
- Fort Collins, Colorado
1999

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Ms. Kelly,

It is possible to separate solids from acetone by multistage filtering. Our trials are successful.

S.Raja Tagore
- Bangalore, Karanataka, India
2003