Environmentally friendly brush water disposal

[Ockius]

Just thought I’d share my method for avoiding tipping dirty brush-wash water down the plug hole, in the hope some people might take it up!

The paints we tend to use for miniatures are acrylics, which as far as I understand (someone correct me if I am wrong) are made of plastic particles suspended in a solvent. This means tipping it down the plug hole is adding extremely tiny micro plastics to the water system, which we all realise is a growing problem. Ideally, then, we want to avoid this.

Here’s what I do:

- wash brush in dish of clean water.
- once water gets too dirty to use, tip it into larger container of dirty liquid.
- clean out the original dish with kitchen towel, bin the kitchen towel (so plastic particles end up locked away in landfill instead of in waterways and sea).
- leave the waste water container open to the air and gradually the water evaporates off, so the liquid steadily thickens and becomes gloopy. Eventually it will dry out and can just be binned (again, putting dried out plastic into landfill instead of tiny particles into water supplies).

Pretty simple.
Feel free to share thoughts, corrections etc.

PS: I do the same with Dettol used for stripping paint. Let it dry out or at least thicken up, then put in a jar with a lid on it and put in bin. It will end up locked in landfill rather than contaminating water.

Boring picture to illustrate:

[Luigi]

I've been just dumping into pots to water some of my plants for years; I had no idea  it was that bad; yikes! 

[Tactalvanic]

I've been just dumping into pots to water some of my plants for years; I had no idea  it was that bad; yikes! 

real or plastic plants?

That aside, its an increasingly important issue, not least because different research papers paint er paint.. as one of the biggest sources of microplastics in the ocean - partially from waste, partially from ware (as in it comes of the sides of ships its painted on etc.

So its really something we need to think of. Although I had not given it much thought until now regards my own minor contributions, its a timely reminder even if our contributions to it directly ourselves is small, its still going on.

[armchairgeneral]

This just hadn’t occurred to me at all so I will try to adopt these disposal practices.

[FifteensAway]

I use plastic pallets when painting and allow to dry and remove any 'globs' of paint first - just slides off, sometimes with a prod from a finger nail - and then soak pallet and use a paper towel to clean as much as possible of remaining paint.  Paper towels to land fill.  When painting in garage, I dump water onto an exterior area of rocks that allows it to settle into the ground.  Still letting waste water go down drain when painting inside but I do wipe as much paint as possible before allowing the last bit down.  I think this thread may inspire me to add a larger container for indoor waste water to be poured out in that same spot (spot is same place waste receptacles sit between weekly pickups).  Actually felt a twinge of wrongness when cleaning pallets this morning before seeing this thread this afternoon (my time).  Glad to see others feel compelled to act environmentally responsible with our hobby.

I have been collecting as much of the scrapings and filings as possible when cleaning metal figures to avoid it all going randomly into a landfill.  I suppose one day I will melt it all down to an ingot for better disposal.  I'd guess I'm near two pounds of the stuff after all these years - pretty impressive for almost only working on 15 mm figures.  Worst offender are the off cuts from Minifigs mounted figures - easily the largest single component.  Not picking on Minifigs, just the largest component.  Second largest is the bases I cut off of animals to transform them into dead critters.

[vexillia]

Water poured down the drain gets treated at the sewage plant and most solids removed (but not micro-plastics).  Wash water poured on the ground runs the risk of polluting the land (concentrating the pigments mainly) and the local water table (always check the label for disposal options).

[Ockius]

Thanks for engaging guys!

They are all tiny changes but when done en masse along with other changes they hopefully make a difference.

I like this one as it does not really add any time or inconvenience at all (besides the inconvenience of having the pot of dirty, gloopifying waste water constantly sitting around!)

[carlos marighela]

I pour my waste brush water onto paper napkins, allow it to solidify then freeze dry it and send it to Gywenth Paltrow. She recycles it into candles and Ben Wa balls.

[zemjw]

I have to confess I'm in the "never occurred to me" camp

However, I will try to do better (he says, having just poured painting water down the sink)

Cat litter seems to be another option, along with things like coffee filters

https://artdiscount.co.uk/blogs/artdiscount/how-to-dispose-of-your-waste-acrylic-paint

[jon_1066]

Sending it to landfill is just adding an extra step to it ending in the ocean.  Leachate is the water that is pumped from landfill that is treated and then discharged.

[Ockius]

Sending it to landfill is just adding an extra step to it ending in the ocean.  Leachate is the water that is pumped from landfill that is treated and then discharged.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that if it is dried out then paint is not really soluble any more (just like paint on models won't wash off in water), so dried out paint in landfill is securely locked away, in a way that plastic pigment particles in water is not. The idea of the waste water pot is that you add to it for months and months until it is thick gloop. Then when ready you can let it dry out fully before disposing.

[Lost Egg]

I use a ceramic tile as a paint palette. Once the paints dry I just soak in some water and the paint lifts off with ease...I then put it in a paper towel and bin.

Never thought about the water I clean my brush in...the actual amount of plastic in it must be very low so I'd have thought tipping it out in different places about the garden should be ok. I'm nowhere near a river so it's unlikely to end up in the water table?

[2010sunburst]

Unfortunately, laudable as all this is, Jon 1066 is correct.  Sorry to be a negative Nelly, but it isn’t soluble plastic (even in paint form the plastic isn’t soluble) that ends up in the waste stream.  Plastic solids dumped in the environment break down into smaller and smaller particles over time.  Eventually these particles become small enough to become suspended in ground water, and that suspension is the source of environmental micro plastics. The only safe way for disposing of plastics is not use them in the first place.  Unfortunately that isn’t going to happen any time soon, if ever, because plastics are just too user friendly.  Even so called biodegradable plastics only really break down into micro plastics more quickly.  They don’t disassociate into their component molecules.  This genie is out of the bottle and only serious scientific resource and effort , followed by huge global governmental investment in the required clean up engineering could potentially put it back.  I understand the problem, I just don’t think there is a solution to it at the moment. 

[Tactalvanic]

Oddly enough there are signs/research suggesting bacterium in the North Atlantic are managing to digest plastic.

But what has not been identified is what they break it down to - eg are they pooping out a worse chemical concoction than they seem to be eating.

Also research into landfill has identified that a combination of Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas bacterial types actually worked the best at breaking down plastics whne they were force "fed" it and nothing else - more research needed.

Still, its  a long way off being viable, and will arrive long after air tax, plastic tax, time tax and all the other microtaxtransactions our decedents will be paying by then to live in orbit above the landfill planet.

Best we all do a bit of something to help so that in future, those said descendants don't see us as such monsters that they resurrect us all just to sentence us in pollution courts of the future as the most heinous of evil disgusting mass murdering environment destroyers, enders of species, living mass extinction enablers of the ancient pass.

I mean - we collect miniatures made of plastic and heavy metals, mountains of them, and then we paint them with... plastic. We will be right up near the top of the list of offenders, excepting we don't through most of it away. we just store it in our own private mounds of 

 

[2010sunburst]

Good call on the biotechnology aspect tactalvanic.  The organic chemistry processing potential of a single bacterium was once described to me as only able to be copied by an industrial complex the size of Manchester!  I know thirty years ago research was being carried out on cleaning up heavy metals such as cadmium from industrial spoil at Porton Down using bacteria, and this approach is similar.  However, once the money ran out, so did the research.  In this case, once the appropriate biochemical pathways have been identified the bacteria can be genetically engineered to maximise processing efficiency.  Following that, the worlds huge biotechnology knowledge and experience can be harnessed to best develop an industrial base to start the clean up.  Trouble is, it will take a huge amount of money and political will to get to this point.  Unless this is government or internationally financed it simply will not happen.  Private finance is focused on investment returns for its shareholders (rightly), and there is no commercial up side to this.  Biodigesting plastics will probably only generate common small molecules with no commercial resale value, so no private company will see it as worthy of investment.  Right now, it’s like trying to turn around a supertanker using a kayak paddle….