The importance of inventory management

The worst job in any chemical research laboratory is taking care of the inventory. The tallying and organising of old chemicals isn’t glamorous. Do you really want to titrate that old n-butyllithium, or are you going to succumb to the siren call of ordering a new bottle for that special reaction of yours?

Neglect and disorganisation is the wrong approach, of course. A well-run laboratory will have an efficient means of entering bottles of chemicals into the inventory and tracking their lifetime and usage. At a minimum, the laboratory cold storage units should be emptied once a year, and each item examined carefully to determine if there is value in keeping it around. A two-year-old bottle of silver triflate is still good, and is probably expensive enough to keep, but if you have a six-year-old bottle of phenyl magnesium bromide in tetrahydrofuran it’s probably all a mass of magnesium salts now. Time to open that bottle and quench it with a high-molecular weight alcohol – or better yet, turn it over to the environmental health and safety experts. 

What does this look like on the tonne scale in a chemical manufacturing facility?