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Solvent mixtures are used to produce crinkle patterns in the gloves, during dipping
■ process in the supported rubber glove manufacturing industry. Toluene, Turpentine,
Acetone and Acetic acid are mainly used as solvents for this process. Spent solvent
mixtures can be contaminated with various chemicals, surfactants, rubber particles &
other impurities that migrate to the solvent mixture during the dipping process. These
solvents can also break down and react with each other or with one another. As a result,
many kinds o f organic impurities can be present in used solvent mixtures.
Because o f the above reasons, solvent mixture can only be used for a limited time and
then it has to be discarded. So the solvent mixture should be purified & recovered in order
to reuse it. Since some o f these organic compounds are toxic, they can’t be discarded to
the environment before any treatment. As a result, discarding used solvents has become a
costly and a challenging issue o f these industries. One solution to this problem is to
recover the usable solvents from the used solvent mixtures.
Recoverable solvents can be obtained by fraction distillation method. According to our
study that used Acetone/ Toluene/ Turpentine/ Acetic acid based used solvents the major
recoverable solvent in the mixture are Toluene and Acetone. Others might have broken
down to the other organic compounds like cyclic compounds & straight chain alkanes &
also presented as many kinds o f byproducts. Recoverable Toluene percentage is about 46
% o f distillate & recoverable Acetone percentage is about 35.8 % o f distillate
