How Can I Safely Remove Sticky Residue from an HCl Bottle?

[mishima]

I found an old bottle of 12 M HCl that has a sticky residue on the outside of the bottle. It had a discoloring effect on blue fabric. How can I safely remove this?

 

[mishima]

I guess that was a little vague. I'm asking how to clean the bottle, not the fabric.

The bottle was inside an acid cabinet, but not a bag alone. It had white crystals near the spout.

 

[chemisttree]

Have you tried rinsing the bottle in water? White crystals might be amine chlorides. This would indicate that sometime during the bottle's history it was improperly stored with volatile amines... usually ammonium hydroxide. Sticky residues can be anything. If the lab uses vacuum pumps and the exhaust from those pumps is not ventilated properly, you can get volatiles from experiments (bad ju ju!) and vacuum pump oil inside someplace like the cabinet beneath a vented hood where acids like this are sometimes stored. In my experience, sticky substances are usually greases and oils from a pump and are best removed with something like hexanes followed by acetone.

YMMV

 

[AGNuke]

Probably leftover glue left after the label was peeled off. Some volatile vapours might had stuck to it, causing that discoloration.