What happens to academic laboratory solvent waste?

Also in this week's C&EN, this great article by Leigh Krietsch Boerner:

Daily solvent use is pretty much a given in a synthetic chemistry lab.

In academic laboratories, it’s such an ingrained part of research that chemists might forget that solvents can be serious safety and health hazards. Commonly used solvents tend to be flammable and carcinogenic, and many can cause organ damage and even death from overexposure. The US Environmental Protection Agency recently added new restrictions and safety measures to the lab favorite dichloromethane because of its adverse health effects.

Solvents aren’t so great for the environment either. Most are classified as hazardous waste and are known to kill fish, pollute the air, and make water undrinkable. But what many chemists either forget or don’t realize is that using solvents in research contributes to climate change.

That’s because a lot of the solvent waste that comes from academic labs is burned, sending carbon dioxide into the air. Between 2011 and 2021, academic labs in the US generated an average of 4,300 metric tons (t) of hazardous waste a year. Almost half this waste is solvents, and more than half the hazardous waste is burned.

Although the ideas and practices of green chemistry are spreading, the amount of waste US academic labs produce annually has stayed roughly the same. C&EN analyzed 10 years of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) biennial hazardous waste reports from US colleges and universities and uncovered the amount of waste that academic labs produced, what kind of waste it was, and what happened to it.

As chemists, I think we should have a good understanding of what happens to our waste once it gets poured into the red can/glass bottle. Read the whole thing.