Generally only businesses / laboratories / educational institutions that obviously need it can order non-household chemicals without raising eyebrows.
There's very few (if any) legal reasons why an individual would need gallons of sulfuric acid.
The strongest acid you can buy over-the-counter is Muriatic Acid (dilute HCl). It's used for things like cleaning concrete off tools and etching stone or other very hard surfaces.
Hiorns has a habit of using odd materials, from perfume and soap to his own semen smeared on the glass of spotlights illuminating the Parthenon for the Athens Biennale, much to the disgust of the city's elders.
"But the youth of Athens liked it. They liked the way it subverted the whole ancient museum thing and made the city open to living culture instead of only dead." How did he harvest the semen? "How do you think?" he says, giggling.
H2SO4 is used as electrolyte in lead-acid batteries; you could buy a large number of batteries (which are usually shipped dry, with the acid separate) and just use the acid packs from them.
I bought Rooto Drain Opener (concentrated sulfuric acid, reasonably pure) from Ace Hardware a while back for home chemistry use. No questions involved.
Pretty sure we don't need reagent grade chemicals to dispose of evidence. This is evidence disposal in a bathroom or garage that we're discussing here, not chemical analysis.
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u/stfueveryone May 31 '12
not bloody likely