Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Can an amateurs synthesize and sell?

smaerd - 27-10-2010 at 19:40

Can amateur chemists synthesize and sell chemicals from home?

I was watching a video on youtube where a chemist made a compound at home and mentioned the profit margin on it. I was wondering if that's legal(in the US)? Obviously nothing controlled or possibly used for anything spooky. So no trouble could come my way by folks misusing things. Help out fellow amateurs while helping myself out, why not?

The reason I'm interested is because I want to experiment but chemicals can often only be bought in bulk. So being able to experiment and then sell the product seems appealing to at least get some cash back.

Industrial labs would no doubt be able to make and sell them cheaper, so I'm not trying to really net profit or anything. Just get something back for having to buy 'bulk' reagents/compounds.

I'm thinking about getting the samples tested for purity at a real lab(GC/MS, etc), etc and setting up a little web-store. I'm not planning on selling anything hazardous, but where can I get information on what needs to be hazmat shipped and what doesn't?

Is this not a good idea? Could I get in trouble still? Thanks for any input!

psychokinetic - 27-10-2010 at 20:29

Depending on specific laws, this sort of thing is probably in the grey area.

Might be legal to sell, legal to buy, legal to use...... but without certainties, certification, backing of a company...

Most people who bought from you would probably be trying to get stuff they can or think they can use for nefarious purposes.

madscientist - 28-10-2010 at 04:51

I wouldn't want to do it without at least getting a LLC set up (Limited Liability Corporation). If you sell as an individual and something goes horribly wrong with one of your products, they could sue you personally.

peach - 28-10-2010 at 06:55

I'd do it, selling it to specific people on here I know reasonably well, not the general public.

And to do it and make ANY money on it it needs to be something that's fairly tricky to produce or to get pure, and you need to be able to do it efficiently and carefully.

No one on here will want table salt obviously. Or anything else they can easily make or buy themselves. And they won't want it to turn up in a barely usable state either, paying five times more than the same thing would cost from a lab supplier.

And I'd 100% forget selling ANYTHING related to explosives, rockets or smoke bombs - the obvious nitrates, chlorates and so on. That is a prime way to get yourself into some very serious trouble very quickly. Not only for their intended use, but also due to the main audience of those often being teens and unsure of what they're doing with chemistry beyond a pryotechnics FAQ.

The legality around chemicals has little to do with the chemical it's self and almost everything to do with intended use. No chemical is illegal in and of it's self, it's just some of them require paperwork and tracking to have. As an example, if uranium was illegal, the UK would be breaking it's own laws to let privately owned power stations (or even government run stations) use it. It's not, they just need assurances of what it's for and where it's going. The same is true of drugs. They're illegal for the general public to have, but not illegal if they're being used to research how brains work; LSD and variants on it are used to tag variants of serotonin docking sites.

If you sell nitric acid on a plating site with guides about plating to people who do plating, that's a massively different thing to selling it in a fireworks store. The intended or suggested use of one is entirely legal and productive, the latter is usually illegal and can easily be very unproductive (blowing up planes for example); the ease with which it can be used to do that illegal thing is also important, e.g. nitrating things into explosives isn't hard, and having the nitric is a strong support for doing that.

More so than you needing to be a registered company, you'd want the buyers to be. Failing that, you want something signed stating it's intended use and proof of who they are and where they are. Not shipping to PO boxes from orders using scrambled up hotmail addresses and store cards or paypal from unknowns. If it hits the fan, the authorities would want you to demonstrate that you were taking an active interest in assuring gimps weren't buying your chemicals. That's a big chunk of what they care about.

There is a new policy in the UK called 'Reach', which is all about that. Getting to know your customers when selling chemicals.

This forum is actually very good for that. A company like Sigma has to judge the customers based on names / bank accounts / statements and rare contacts. Here, if I've seen someone going on about plating for the last year and read 100 of their posts and they've been going on about not having something, then eventually buy it, it's not hard to argue (legally) that I had good reason to believe it'd be used for plating, not building a huge bomb.

[Edited on 28-10-2010 by peach]

mr.crow - 28-10-2010 at 08:54

I would not do it. Every time I do a synthesis it takes all day and I expose myself to fumes, make a mess, etc. Why would I do this to make a few bucks?

smaerd - 28-10-2010 at 10:48

Thanks for all of the input.

@mr.crow - like I said it wasn't to make a few bucks it was just to get some funds back. So for example I buy a kg of ___, I only wanted 50g to do an experiment, so I could repeat the synthesis over and over then sell off the remainder for what I got/made it for.

@all -
Now I'm thinking instead of doing the synthesis I want to, then selling the product. I could sell the excess chemicals I bought on here for what I paid for them + shipping. I'd list the supplier from which I got it from, pictures, melting point test, etc.

That way purity isn't an issue, incase I would mess up a synthesis because I am a noob this is bound to happen.
I could "know" the audience as peach suggested check posts, to make sure for all I know it would be going into the right hands.

I know I'm not exactly tight with the community here but I hope to maybe help you guys to help me in the future. Thanks for helping me sort this out.

I appreciate the input, and yea its just not a good idea for me to be selling chemicals I made myself for the above reasons, as well as with my current skill level.

12AX7 - 28-10-2010 at 10:50

I've sold more than a few pounds of chlorate before. It's legal and easy to ship (ORM-D).

That reminds me, I still have a few kilos of white crystal left. :)

Tim

bquirky - 28-10-2010 at 10:59

this thread reminds me.. i cant wait to see the next series of breaking bad :)

Ive often wondered why the guys that have gotten there sodium electrolysis cell's working haven't mentioned selling the excess sodium off. i guess its just a pain to ship.


peach - 28-10-2010 at 12:56

Quote: Originally posted by 12AX7  
I've sold more than a few pounds of chlorate before. It's legal and easy to ship (ORM-D).

That reminds me, I still have a few kilos of white crystal left. :)

Tim


It's legal until a member of the noobine collection gets caught with a few pounds of it doing something stupid. Then... questions may be asked as to why you gave it to them.

As I was saying, uranium is legal. It's not legal to sell ore if you know, or suspect, or they can show that you should have suspected, it was going towards something like a dirty bomb.

Making fireworks in the UK is technically illegal. So, selling pounds of it to someone you know (or could have easily found to be) interested in fireworks would likely mean you would be considered criminally negligent.

[Edited on 28-10-2010 by peach]

digitalemu - 28-10-2010 at 12:56

Quote: Originally posted by bquirky  
this thread reminds me.. i cant wait to see the next series of breaking bad :)

Ive often wondered why the guys that have gotten there sodium electrolysis cell's working haven't mentioned selling the excess sodium off. i guess its just a pain to ship.




I highly doubt anyone who makes their own sodium cell is really going to have much in the way of excess. It would not be worth it considering what goes into making and running a cell that actually works easily and safely. Spending the day skimming tiny globs of sodium off the surface of 300 degree NaOH to get 100g of the stuff if your lucky cannot be too much fun unless you enjoy being burnt occasionally. When working with those things it's tough not getting burnt either from the heat of hot the NaOH or the corrosiveness of it. The NaOH seems to get everywhere. You get burnt in one way or another, it's inevitable. ;)

BromicAcid - 28-10-2010 at 14:06

Although I can't find it for the life of me, there was at one time a thread discussing the chemicals that could be made in a home lab that had potential to be sold on eBay. The lowest hanging fruit being chloroform which occasionally sells for >$1 per mL. The problem with the latter being that the production generates a large quantity of hazardous waste. Annoying that I can't find the thread though, there were plenty of ideas.

entropy51 - 28-10-2010 at 16:44

I served some hard time in small chemical manufacturers. It's a rough life, trust me. Preps that worked great on the 50 gm scale don't work at all on the kg scale, the supplier for your main starting material goes out of business, etc. etc. Legal shipping and waste disposal become huge issues. Sooner or later a bottle of mercaptan will leak in a UPS truck and the lawyers come a calling.

My personal favorite was the enormous chemical company who insisted that although that nitro compound was analytically pure, it should be white, not yellow, and they wouldn't pay the invoice until was white, dammit!

Anyone contemplating such an idea should definitely read Max Gergle's book "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide ?", which Polverone has posted in the Forum Library. This book captures the frustrations of the small chemical company in high fidelity.

zed - 28-10-2010 at 22:39

Pick your battles.

Most businesses are damned tough to manage at a profit.

Perhaps the "big boys" avoid small transactions for that very reason.

By the time a $25.00 transaction is completed, most of the sweet, sweet profits.....have been drained away by labor and handling costs.

bquirky - 29-10-2010 at 02:47

I Love 'pop' economics so how is this for a theory..


I think for it to work you have to take advantage of some kind of asymatery you need to be able to do something more esaley/cheaply/faster than your customer or your competitors.

Either by knowing something special.
having some special equipment.
having some odd or unusawal process setup and running
being able to buy a product cheaper than the customer. <-- This is most all retail buisnesss being willing to sell sompthing being willing to sell sompthing no one else is. <-- other less 'formal' retail buisnesses ;)
being willing to do sompthing no one else is.

if you cant confidently put yourself into one of those catagorys you may be barking up the wrong tree








ScienceSquirrel - 29-10-2010 at 03:16

There are people who manage to make some money by buying in bulk and repackaging. Chemicals like copper sulphate, calcium hydroxide, etc have legitimate uses such as Bordeaux mixture so you have a wider customer base as well.

peach - 29-10-2010 at 13:40

Repacking is where eBay is at, those guys are just buying 5l containers and splitting them.

Nurd Rage gave a prime example where he'd been sent manganese that was largely sand.

There are numerous chemicals that are simply so specialized not many people bother carrying them. The fine chemicals that are novel and related to some specialized field. Those could be a target for serious commercial sale. But then, you will need those to be pure to chromatography standards and so on.

A lot of chemicals aren't purposefully produced, they're byproducts that are traded as one persons waste to another persons needs. The fine chemicals tend to be specifically made, by hand, in small quantities. Kilos to grams or micrograms for things to do with enzymes and biology.

I'm not really that interested in the idea of selling things through sites like eBay. That's repacking, not really interesting and a potential problem causer. You have zero idea who's buying it and there is a fairly good chance it'll be going towards fireworks / explosives or drugs, since it's so easy to buy on there and the details aren't too hard to disguise when compared to a lab supplier account.

Since the question was about synthesizing yourself, I don't think that really applies to eBayers. They're after incredibly basic stuff that's not worth synthesizing, it's barely worth it if you buy in bulk and then repack it.

Particularly given the risk. I can live without an extra £1 on a bottle of peroxide if it means I don't have to deal with police visits asking why I'm selling liquid bomb components.

An example of things I'd be interested in making would be anhydrous lewis acids. Those aren't common over the shelf things. They're not really used for the common drug routes, not much use in explosives, but they also require quite a lot of care to keep them anhydrous as they're made. And the bottles of it I've bought have been horrible. So I'm interested in making my own for a start, and would sell it if I was happy that it was clean and anhydrous.

I'd go for specialized enough only people on sites like this will know what it is and what it should do, complicated enough it's a pain to make at home, yet also not directly related to bombs or drugs.

[Edited on 29-10-2010 by peach]

bquirky - 30-10-2010 at 10:30

I just finished reading "EXCUSE ME SIR,. WOULD YOU LIKE TO. BUY A KILO OF. ISOPROPYL BROMIDE?" as was posted earlier by entropy51 in this thread. what a great read. i have a feeling Gergel whould have been a real ebayer :)

regards.

Netherlands planning on outlawing certain lab equip

The WiZard is In - 2-11-2010 at 09:26

In Quest for 'Legal High,' Chemists Outfox Law
Wall Street Journal 30-31 X 10


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870476390457555...


djh
---
I expect that Woman will be
the last thing civilized by Man.

George Meredith

ScienceSquirrel - 2-11-2010 at 10:03

I doubt many would be willing to get that close to the line.
There are several ways that his business could go really bad plus there is the moral question of supplying untested materials to people who intend to consume them.
His actions also add a good reason for the authorities to make chemicals and equipment harder to acquire for everybody else including amateur chemists and small companies.


[Edited on 2-11-2010 by ScienceSquirrel]

anotheronebitesthedust - 2-11-2010 at 12:37

It just goes to show that no matter how many laws they pass the soldiers of the "War On Some People Who Use Some Drugs" will continue to fight and adapt.