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I'm throwing out a lot of old packaging materials and was advised by online AI that gasoline and/or acetone was a great solvent for urethane foam!

I happened to have old gasoline I needed to dispose of on-hand, so it was serendipitous.

I tore up the foam, put it in a large cement mixing bin, and poured the old gas over it. My plan was to melt the urethane down into sludge, let the old gasoline evaporate, and then have far less volume to get rid of.

Well, it doesn't work. You end up with gasoline soaked sponges.

Protip: always test with a small amount first. Of course, I did not do this.

I'm throwing out a lot of old packaging materials and was advised by online AI that gasoline and/or acetone was a great solvent for urethane foam! I happened to have old gasoline I needed to dispose of on-hand, so it was serendipitous. I tore up the foam, put it in a large cement mixing bin, and poured the old gas over it. My plan was to melt the urethane down into sludge, let the old gasoline evaporate, and then have far less volume to get rid of. Well, it doesn't work. You end up with gasoline soaked sponges. Protip: always test with a small amount first. Of course, I did not do this.

(post is archived)

[–] • 4 pts

It forgot the step of igniting the gas/urethane mixture with a torch. As we all know by now, you always ignite hazardous chemicals in order to dispose of them. Come on man!

[–] • 2 pts

Next time I'll follow the EPA's advice and torch it.

[–] • 0 pt

It's the most environmentally friendly thing to do. Why wait hundreds of years for it to turn back into dirt when your torch can do it in just a couple of hours?

[–] • 1 pt

advised by online AI

Always fact check what a chatbot tells you. Large language models like GPT-3 don't have any mechanism to determine whether what they're saying is true. Often it is, because there is a decent amount of true stuff in it's training data but that's not reliable.

[–] • 1 pt

Kek. Napalm?

[–] [deleted] • 2 pts

requires a third ingredient, no?

[–] • 0 pt

Children?

[–] • 0 pt

We don't joke about children

[–] • 1 pt (edited )

I was not making napalm. I'm just trying to dispose of excessive quantities of urethane foam without it taking forever because of the ridiculous volume to weight ratio.

I can tell you from my childhood that styrofoam + gasoline gives you jellied gasoline, which is similar to napalm. That's what I was hoping would happen with urethane foam. Then I could evaporate off the gas and throw away the leftover plastic sludge. They lied, it doesn't.

[–] • 1 pt

Acetone works the best

[–] • 2 pts

I have a small bottle, but it's no where close to enough.

[–] • 0 pt

Petrol dissolves Styrofoam, not urethane foam. Easy to confuse but very different chemically.