Can I Reuse the Vials?

Chemists and researchers wonder if they may reuse chromatography vials and closures. Well, at least after a thorough cleaning in laboratory dishwashers designed for lab glassware.
If you reused the vials, earlier chemicals (attached to the wall’s surface) might interfere with your study. When it comes to impurity testing, reusing vials might be a problem for impurity calculations. There’s a chance you’ll get an extra peak if there’s a danger of contamination. In this article, you will find out what happens when the vials get contaminated.
Personally, if you want to reuse, you should consider utilizing vial inserts.

1. Need fewer samples
2. Generate less waste when discarded
There’s also the benefit of not needing to dispose of a large amount of vial cleaning solvent.
Even with inserts, it’s a good idea to run a blank after every injection to ensure no contamination.
If the vials you’re using have screw tops (usually it comes to use HPLC), be sure you don’t reuse the caps.
It is for the best to continuously purchase a new vial. If nothing, especially when your analyte concentrations are predicted to be either very high or very low.
Re-running those samples will cost you more in terms of:
1. time.
2. materials.
3. and energy than vial recycling.
Most likely, standard laboratory processes demand that vials and closures are consumable products. Therefore, it would be best to dispose of the vials after each use, especially when employing glass autosampler vials.
You can clean the autosampler vials in laboratory dishwashers. Scientists often use dishwashers for washing laboratory glassware. The washed vials are then used in the laboratory to save money on consumables.

The cleaning is damaging the glass vials. Also, this process is inefficient at eliminating contaminants from the vial surface.
This contamination is unexpected and creates interference peaks in LC and GC chromatography applications. Unpredictable contamination is a common source of unexplainable assay failures, necessitating the re-analysis of whole sample runs.
You will see later in this article the results of reusing old vials, so keep reading for more information.
But, in general, yes, you can use them. But, there are a lot of aspects you have to consider. For example, you need to know how to clean them properly.