My Styrofoam + Limonene Experiment
After seeing Steve’s interesting post about dissolving polystyrene with limonene I knew I had to learn more!
I found this interesting tidbit about limonene at Wikipedia:
As the main odor constituent of citrus (plant family Rutaceae), d-limonene is used in food manufacturing as a flavoring, and added to cleaning products such as hand cleansers to give a lemon-orange fragrance. See: orange oil.
Limonene is increasingly being used as an environmentally friendly alternative to mineral oils as a solvent for cleaning purposes, such as the removal of oil from machine parts, being more easily biodegradable than mineral oils, and produced from a renewable source (citrus oil, as a byproduct of orange juice manufacture.) Limonene works as paint stripper when applied to painted wood. The (R)-enantiomer is also used as botanical insecticide.
The (S)-enantiomer, also known as l-limonene (CAS number 5989-54-8, EINECS number 227-815-6), is used as a fragrance in some cleaning products. In contrast to the citrus (orange-lemon) scent (see above) of d-limonene, the enantiomer l-limonene has a piney, turpentine-like odor.
Just for fun I decided to try a little experiment…
My wife has a small bottle of orange aromatherapy oil. Its pretty pungent stuff, so I figured it must contain some limonene.
I tried dripping some on a block of polystyrene to see what would happen. At first I was pretty disappointed - nothing seemed to happen. When I went back a couple minutes later however, I started seeing lots of tiny bubbles. A little while later there was a depression where the oil had been.
I tried it again and took some pictures:
As you can see in the pictures, it definitely works! I can only imagine what a more concentrated solution could do!
Obviously it might be a little impractical to spray down all your polystyrene packing materials with citrus oil, not to mention the fact that one would still need to do something with the resulting liquid!
Interesting stuff nevertheless!!
If you happen to be looking for citrus oil cleaning products, check out Kokopelli’s Green Market
Technorati Tags: citrus oil, limonene, polystyrene, styrofoam, recycling
Written by Bentley on October 3rd, 2006 with
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