So, this is somewhat of a concept / I'm curious and might (read: probably) never get around to doing, but anyway.
I make my own beer/wine and am very interested in the concept of recycle/reduce/reuse. So most of the materials I can get or retrofit to work for a new purpose I will. It goes without saying that containers are a crucial part of making your own beer/wine and I have had to bite the bullet and get a few 5 gallon glass carboys for my fermentation vessels. However, I'm always in the market for more/varied containers.
So the lab here at work goes through alot of 1 gallon+ size chemical bottles and they just stack up outside waiting to be recycled. There's 2 types.
Type one: Opaque sturdy white plastic ones that hold anything labeled from "water, reagent" to mildly dangerous chemicals.
Type two: Brown glass, thick, heavy, with superduty lids. The chemicals I've seen on the labels are Potassium Permanganate (spelling?), Ethyl Alcohol, and Petroleum Ether. Bad stuff. Like 3 or 4 in several categories on the MSDS sheets. But only 1 in the Health category if i recall correctly.
Here's my two main questions. Could you ever clean these things enough to be safe? Could you test them to make sure they are clean?
Thoughts and concerns are appreciated. I need these guys to be clean not just for the obvious safety reasons but they will have young beer or wine in them for extended periods of time and will pick up off flavors/odors if they can.
For those of you who know these containers do you think they will stand up to the pressure of carbonation? For example a normal wine bottle will shatter (known as bottle bombs) or at least eject a cork if you try to bottle sparkling wine or beer in it. However, a champagne bottle / beer bottle with a bottle cap will hold up to the pressure. These bottles seem pretty strong/sturdy.