Good times today in the old North Seattle chemistry lab. We set up a soxhlet apparatus for the purpose of practice. The thing we extracted?-- chlorophyll and triglycerides from some home-grown (well, lab grown, really) algae. Thanks Kat and Marian for parting with some of your babies in the name of science.
The purpose of conducting this experiment is to have a solid handle on the set up and procedure before it's used for microplastics. Rather than algae, we'll be soxhleting virgin polypropelene pellets -- which will now and forever be referred to as 'virgin pp'-- and hopefully be able to quantify the concentration of PCB's leaching into the suckers from Lake Washington. After the leaching, the pellets must be referred to as 'tainted pp', because the term is more scientifically accurate.
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