> How many more bottle-washers did they have to hire? Or are they using expensive people to wash bottles?
"They", who? Marine Institute? Probably zero, due to the nature of their samples (biological material) and scale (~8 samples/day). I wouldn't be surprised if they just leave the flasks overnight in a sodium hypochlorite solution.
The same however might not apply to a laboratory handling another type of sample, where cleaning the glassware might involve multiple solutions, or might require that the glassware "soaks" in the cleaning solution for a large amount of time, or handling a larger amount of daily samples. And it isn't just a matter of the required workforce to clean those flasks, but also additional space being used, or actually increasing waste and electricity usage through the cleaning process. That's my point anyway - those results from the Marine Institute don't generalise so well.
I was bottle washing in a marine bio lab in 1978. We used an Analar product to wash glassware which didn't measure dissolved phosphate levels and iirc Chromic acid for the ones which did. From memory, the colorimeter was pretty shit at phosphate anyway.
We did glass pipettes for everything and they were a royal pain to rinse until I rigged an automatic syphon made with a 2l measure and some plastic bits.
I went to work stoned and fell over carrying a week's glass back to the drying cab. I think I won the lab sweepstake for breakage value that day.
200 trips to the firth of forth seaside towns, one pair of gumboots, and a labcoat which was stolen the first week of uni in 1979. Coastal estuarine waterflow is fascinating.
"They", who? Marine Institute? Probably zero, due to the nature of their samples (biological material) and scale (~8 samples/day). I wouldn't be surprised if they just leave the flasks overnight in a sodium hypochlorite solution.
The same however might not apply to a laboratory handling another type of sample, where cleaning the glassware might involve multiple solutions, or might require that the glassware "soaks" in the cleaning solution for a large amount of time, or handling a larger amount of daily samples. And it isn't just a matter of the required workforce to clean those flasks, but also additional space being used, or actually increasing waste and electricity usage through the cleaning process. That's my point anyway - those results from the Marine Institute don't generalise so well.