Denatured Alcohol
The other day I cleaned a large surface with denatured alcohol and wore a blue nitrile glove on the hand holding the soaked rag. The next day I had a small spot to clean and didn’t bother with a glove since small amounts of skin contact with alcohol are not harmful; we often use isopropyl alcohol to clean skin. This led to musing on the concept of denatured alcohol. Denatured alcohol is 90% ethanol, an alcohol so mild to the body that people drink it. Drinking ethanol, while not acutely toxic, is still a problematic thing, so its distribution is controlled by law and heavily taxed. Ethanol is so useful for other things though, like fueling cars or cleaning, that it is worthwhile to have a way to distribute it in a form unsuitable for beverage consumption. So it is “denatured,” rendered unfit for drinking by mixing into it poisonous substances, traditionally methanol. Because ethanol is harmful to individuals and society, we make it safe to use freely by rendering it too toxic to ingest.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
G.
October 23, 2014
I was thinking of the same phenomenon in connection with my posts on superstimulus.
If watching porn instantly made you impotent and unhappy, or if overeating instantly bloated you out, hardly anyone would do it. Porn and obesity are time preference viruses.
For some folks, in the long run ethanol is more toxic than an admixture of methanol.
Vader
October 23, 2014
Is methanol still used to denature ethanol? I would have thought the trendy thing would be to denature it with Bittrex.
John Mansfield
October 23, 2014
I had heard that some modern formulations go that way, unpalatable or nauseating but not acutely poisonous. Looking up an MSDS for my particular product, Crown brand, it reports a composition: 65-75% methanol, 10-20% ethanol, <10% isopropanol, <10% methyl isobutyl ketone. I'm feeling a bit ripped off; this stuff was never natured in the first place.
bookslinger
October 24, 2014
We used 91% isopropyl alcohol (available at most drugstores and Health/Beauty-Aids sections of grocery stores) to clean plastic surfaces of electronic equipment. Takes off smudges from both smooth and textured surfaces.
Bruce Charlton
October 27, 2014
I wonder who (in the USA) started calling methylated spirits ‘denatured’ – an erroneous use of the word. ‘Meths’ has not had a natural property removed, but a toxic element added.
The usual scientific use of ‘denatured’ is to describe the disruption of the folded, 3-D structure of protein – for example by heat (that is what is happening to the albumin when cooking an egg – the protein turns from transparent to opaque white as it loses its 3-D structure).
It is mostly by denaturing proteins (eg in enzymes that cause decay) that cooking makes food last longer.
But alcohol (whether ethanol or methanol) will itself denature protein – which is one of the ways that methylated spirit sterilizes things. So maybe it was this confusion that caused the misapplied term?