If it's poured down the sink, the water treatment plant has to filter that out. Another option is to nuetralize it with the soda and then let it evaporate before throwing out. Unfortunately, who has a safe place to leave pickle out as it evaporates?
G’day; Sorry, but the sewage treatment plant doesn’t FILTER out
substances which are in solution, like the copper sulphate in
spent pickle. Anyway, there would not be as much as 0.1% copper
in the spent sparex (sodium bisulphate), so the amount of copper
you threw away would amount to very little indeed. Until very
recently we depended on a septic tank in our garden for our
sewage and waste water disposal as the city sewage system didn’t
reach us. I used to empty my pickle pot down the sink with the
tap turned full on, and for 15 years we never had problems at all
(except when it rained like a waterfall!)
And if you’re interested, we are still using rain water for
everything as it tastes so much nicer than the stuff in the city
supply pipes - which run past our place!
In sewage there is just about every substance you could think of
- and a whole lot more you couldn’t. The copper in the pickle
would soon be chelated (combined with other atoms and molecules
in such a way that it becomes non-reactive) unless a barrel of
saturated copper sulphate went down the pan - and THEN there’d be
Trouble indeed.
However if you are still worried, by all means keep a pot of
sawdust or fine shavings available into which you could empty
neutralised pickle, and allow it to evaporate safely, then
finally bag it and get it to the usual disposal system.
The only acid NOT to get into sawdust is concentrated nitric
acid - your sawdust may well catch fire! But dilute and
neutralised sulphuric acid - no problem. Cheers,
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/ /| \ @John_Burgess2
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At sunny Nelson NZ where it mostly rains at night!