Horror like storage rooms at my highschool
I'm just a student, but I don't need a degree to see that our storage room for chemicals is (how to put it nicely) fucked up. This is just a fraction of the horror that's out there.
Cracked lids on the acid bottles, so the fumes are destroying the shelves and everything in the room.
Bottles where the label is oxidized or completely missing, so god knows what's in them
Chemicals from as far back as 1949, which have been banned in schools and all over europe for decades. There's pounds of mercury and other heavy metals, but at least they put some of those poisons in a separate cabinet while cleaning
Non-functional ventilation and rooms underground without windows, so the fumes stick in there and react with each other to form even more interesting compounds
It periodically floods when it rains and the water mixes together all the stuff there is on the ground. I once noticed that the water was green in one corner of the room and purple on the other.
Unstable reagents, that can form explosive substances over time, have been sitting there for over 40 years
Storing things by mood and alphabet, things that shouldn't be within a mile of each other are next to each other on a shelf
Last week I found an explosive, potentially sensitive to impact, just lying around amongst other chemicals starting with the same letter. They told me to put it somewhere aside, and to label it somehow so others wouldn't touch it :)
I know that the school doesn't have the money to dispose of it, since the companies are charging outrageous amounts to dispose of a few bottles, and that the professors are trying to address it somehow. But there are literaly tones of chemicals, because our school used to hoard stuff that companies were getting rid of. Most of them are useless for a basic student, so it will sit there until either something happens or the school gets money.