Spring 2016 Week 12: Spring Cleaning

Hello, all, and welcome back to yet another week where I shall share with you what I have done with my time at TGen. Let's get started! Tuesday was a good day filled with productivity. Kathleen and I spent over four hours downstairs in the waste room doing a little spring cleaning. We first started by going through this huge stack of expired kits that the labs could no longer use. Since nearly all of them were still sealed, we had to cut them open to see what was inside. once we opened them up we cataloged what was in them and if it was hazardous or if we could dispose of it down the drain. Unfortunately, nearly none of the chemicals were reusable so we threw a lot of stuff away. We were able to recycle the containers of some of the nonhazardous chemicals though. After that was done, we went through all the spill kits that were stored down there along with a huge drum and multiple boxes of "socks" and "pillows" for cleaning up spills. The reason for the quotation marks is because these "socks" and "pillows" are not articles of clothing that you wear on your feet or a comfortable sleeping support. Instead, they are fabric tubes, or squares, filled with absorbent materials used to clean up different types of hazardous spills. We found lots of cool stuff while perusing through all the stuff we didnt know TGen had. Once we were done with that we began to reorganize the place. We got a rack brought up from the basement by facilities to be placed in a corner in the common area so that we could store things that we thought should be easily accessible. Some of the things that we moved out onto this rack were all those reusable chemicals that I cataloged, the bins for both the spent bulbs and batteries, and a few hazardous spill kits. This was pretty much the bulk of the day. The rest of the day was spent emailing the help desk about the posters that I was trying to print. They told me that they weren't going to print the posters because they thought it wasn't going to turn out correctly, but after I assured them that the formatting is how it's supposed to be they finally decided to print it. Well, guess what happened..... I was right! The posters came out perfect and we only have to trim off two strips of white space which is about 1/2"x44".


Thursday was another very productive day, even though it is my short day. We started off by disposing of old DNA samples that were left in the freezers in the basement by previous labs. After this, it was all desk work. Kathleen sent me the old "Hazardous Waste Management Guide" so that I can review it and make changes to the document as needed. Basically, she wants me to review it and make sure that everything makes sense and then put in the new info we gathered months ago about waste minimization. She also asked me to create a how-to guide for creating the safety posters. She wants this so that in the future when I'm no longer an intern, she, or her new intern, can print off more safety posters or even create them if need be. These are tasks that will carry over into next week so expect to hear about it again.

Well, once again, thank you for visiting my blog, and like always, I hope you enjoyed reading.