Can You Dissolve STEEL with PLASTIC? Turning PVC Plastic Into Hydrochloric Acid (HD)

Duration: 2:35

All over the Internet, you can find documents and videos that say #3 plastics (polyvinyl chloride, or PVC) decompose into hydrogen chloride whenever they're heated. This, to me, seemed like an easy, at-home route to obtain hydrochloric acid, which is just a aqueous solution of hydrogen chloride. Needless to say, I was kind of shocked to find that after having the Internet for over 20 years, nobody has posted anything on making acid from PVC. So I set out to be the first. In this video, I obtained almost 10mL of impure, fuming hydrochloric acid (40% conc. or higher) using only a few old pieces of scrap PVC tubing (plus the necessary heater vessel and glassware). In the end, the water was SO saturated with hydrogen chloride, that it spontaneously boiled when I first disturbed it with a steel nail! Not bad for #3 plastic! This process can be easily scaled up to produce as much acid as you could ever hope for, and doesn't require other nasty chemicals (like sulfuric acid) to act as starting materials. I estimate that one can produce a full liter of acid from just 2 to 3kg of PVC (assuming a 50% reaction yield)! I recommend adding some kind of scrubber/filter to help remove the tar and residual hydrocarbons from the fumes before passing them through the water to get acid. Hope this idea takes off and other YouTubers start trying this out! Feel free to try this at home, just be safe (and work in a ventilated area). Acidic and toxic gases are no joke, and I take no responsibility for injuries that may result from others trying my experiments.