Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Anyone registered a company to obtain equipment/reagents?

BlazeBall - 10-9-2012 at 06:23

Since you don't need to have a trading business to register as a company (at least not in the UK) and it costs next to nothing, I was wondering if anyone had attempted to order equipment or reagents from businesses that will only ship to other companies, by way of registering a private company?

[Edited on 10-9-2012 by BlazeBall]

triplepoint - 10-9-2012 at 18:43

I haven't done that, but I do order items sometimes through my day job, even though it clearly has nothing to do with chemistry. I've never ordered anything that would automatically get flagged and scrutinized and I've never had an order rejected or questioned.

zed - 15-9-2012 at 11:47

If you register as a company, and pay the fees, you could be considered to be a company.

Here in the U.S., if you then use that company as a "front" to traffic in restricted chemicals that "find" their way into illegal drug manufacturing.....your ass will be "grass".

Special laws have been formulated, and extra punishments are meted out.

phlogiston - 15-9-2012 at 12:24

If you don't order anything really suspicious or dangerous I would not expect it is a problem.
I work in a hospital laboratory and do occasionally have to order explosive/hallucinogenic/radioactive etc chemicals for legitimate research purposes and know from experience there are questions/forms/permits to submit for such items, but not for anything relatively harmless and 'ordinary' , at least not where I work.
Ofcourse, you have to comply with environmental and any other applicable laws and as a business you may perhaps be regularly checked for compliance.

[Edited on 15-9-2012 by phlogiston]

Swede - 15-9-2012 at 17:58

I have a company and have attempted to do just what you suggest.

But you need a business address in the USA at least. Otherwise, the mail order system at Mega-ChemLabs Inc. activates 200 db alarms that say WHOOP WHOOP address is a RESIDENT, not a BUSINESS! CANCEL ORDER, CANCEL ORDER.

MrHomeScientist - 17-9-2012 at 05:47

What about getting a UPS mailbox for your business? Would that pass the "resident" check? I looked into doing this a while back, but I can buy / make almost anything I need nowadays, with enough searching & research, so it ended up not being worth the effort.

Mailinmypocket - 17-9-2012 at 07:34

Quote: Originally posted by MrHomeScientist  
What about getting a UPS mailbox for your business? Would that pass the "resident" check? I looked into doing this a while back, but I can buy / make almost anything I need nowadays, with enough searching & research, so it ended up not being worth the effort.


If they see a UPS mailbox or P.O. BOX they ask for the actual business address unfortunately. I've tried in the past to see. They don't mind if the billing address is a post office box etc, but they always want to know the business address as well.

Eliteforum - 17-9-2012 at 09:38

Yes. I reside in the UK though. It's easy enough to go to the bank and register for a business account. Of course you'll need a lot of other things such as vat number, tax records, etc. A business address is easy enough, just rent a store lockup/unit. Of course you'll need to have insurance to certify that your business address is fine to store whatever it is your ordering in case of fire etc.

Of course, I did this for work reasons, and not just as an alternative route to order hard to aquire chemicals. Because believe me, it doesn't work out to be the cheapest option.

GreenD - 21-9-2012 at 08:51

I've ordered from sigma before - not a red flag chemical but it was quite confusing.
"Mr GreenD we cannot ship to you, sorry"
2 days later it shows up in the mail room.

go figure. I had a business address though.

Company

cal - 21-9-2012 at 10:10

I have a company that is registered in the US and I can only order the non-watched chemicals unless I fill out a D.E.A. information form and supply an intended use statement with it.
Too much hassle and paper trail so I make most of what I need.:cool:

cyanureeves - 21-9-2012 at 16:21

what if you're a maintenance supervisor or something and order in c/o such and such name. would they ship cyanide?janitors do use chemicals and i am so tempted to bribe my supervisor or just order and beat him to the mail room. sigma not only denied my cyanide order but i had to almost beg not to get charged for cancelling my order.i ordered a whole bunch of stuff like TEST TUBES,BEAKERS,cyanide,HYDROXIDES,ETC.. i tried to slip in cyanide so it wouldnt be noticed. they noticed.

DieForelle - 25-9-2012 at 10:18

This whole issue is periodically discussed "without conclusion". Why chemicals aren't sold to individuals by the first-line companies seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce to me. I can certainly understand blocking drugs & precursors, as long as that's part of a so-called national drug policy. (Doesn't seem to be stopping the people who want to abuse drugs from doing so...or preventing the violence associated with prohibition.) But the fact you can go into a Home Depot, buy HCl or sulfuric acid and burn your face off without, as has been shown recently, being able to sue everyone out of existence because of your stupidity...yet some company like Spectrum wouldn't sell some stearoyl lactylate to a home baker in a bazillion years just doesn't really make sense. Because we know that they vet certain items anyhow...no matter who the buyer is. AND, it's not merely a matter of a business address, as I've already mentioned that Spectrum will not sell to restaurants, but obviously they do sell to food manufacturers. Do they really think every food manufacturer has a PhD chemist supervising how much emulsifier to add to a dough, while a restaurant would be hopelessly unable to calculate what 0.25% w/w flour means?

All of these companies know that their non-hazardous, non-DEA stuff can get diverted to home users, and that they are powerless to stop it - just look at ebay. I know ways to get almost any company, for a price, except from Sigma who don't seem to have a reseller network of any kind. (If you can get me SAFC food ingredients, feel free to message me!)
So why not just give up and allow buyers to sign a release form as the 3rd tier suppliers like Elemental Scientific do? If someone burns themselves up with JT Baker HCl, is anyone going to care and start to shun them or something? Versus Home Depot HCl? Even the most professionally authoritative chemists can screw up: Steven Zumdahl once burned a bunch of people with a thermite demonstration gone bad. Was Aldrich sued for providing the metal powders? Maybe they were, we'd have to ask them!

The most plausible idea, as I and others have speculated, is the small amt. of revenue they would make selling to hobbyists vastly exceeds the commercial insurance they would require, and/or the hassle they think they'd incur. But it's easy to poke a hole in at least the first part of that theory: top quality lab HCl is no less than 10X as expensive as HD HCl, and thus the potential market of HD HCl is thousands of times greater. You'd have to assume the HD HCL suppliers need literally BILLIONS in commercial liability insurance. Well, clearly, they don't have that or they would not be able to operate. Also, it's possible that back during the counter culture 1960s, the DEA had a long "get with the program" chat with the lab supply industry, and told them they had to abide by certain unwritten rules. Even today you sometimes hear of naifs calling Sigma or whoever and being told it's "against the law" to sell chemicals to individuals. Which of course we know isn't true...

I've had someone from Texas Instruments cold call me asking if I needed any information on their audio chips or even a sample, even though I signed up on the website as a single hobbyist with no business name. Imagine a first-line chemical company doing that...not gonna happen! Proof that other industrial suppliers see small-potato good will as a potentially important part of their business.

DieForelle - 25-9-2012 at 10:33

"Because we know that they vet certain items anyhow...no matter who the buyer is."

My point in this is, if the Holsum Bakery in Camden, NJ, orders a kilo of Sodium azide from Spectrum, we certainly HOPE it will raise some red flags. And I suspect it would.

BTW - is anybody old enough to remember when chemicals were no longer sold in hobby shops? As a kid I saw the "lab" of a guy in the neighborhood who had been a kid in the early 1970s. He had a small bottle of KCN that I'm almost certain came from a hobby store. I remember feeling a visceral fear just from holding the bottle! BTW...that guy went on to be a rocket scientist with a degree from MIT. But, of course, we wouldn't want to encourage kids to play with chemicals! I think the brand was Testor but could be wrong.



[Edited on 25-9-2012 by DieForelle]

jackson2004 - 27-11-2012 at 20:07

Yes in UK it is relatively easy to register a company and attain reagents under that company name.
Wouldn't try Sigma, but Molekula will sell almost anything they have listed as buy it now to a registered Ltd company.
Other companies also require a business delivery address.

For a business telephone number, i'd recommend getting a free 0845 number, there are hundreds of sites that set one up in seconds, and once you have one you can have it forward to whatever contact number you want, or you can set the out of hours to always, so it just takes a message that it then emails to you. All totally free! You can have as many numbers as you want, and close them down at a click of a button.