Guide
Toll distillation and toll chemical manufacture with distillation
Updated
Toll manufacturing with distillation facilities is a step up from blending: the site is separating your material, and its columns, controls and safety program decide the result.
Talk to a specialist Who owns the materials, who carries the price risk, and the clauses to settle before a formulation leaves your building.
What toll distillation services do
Toll distillation separates or purifies a material you own, such as recovering a solvent, removing a light end or cutting a fraction to specification. Ask what columns the site has, batch or continuous, with what number of stages and under what vacuum range.
Ask for the specification the site will commit to on each cut, and how the cuts you do not keep are returned to you or disposed of, because under a toll they are still your material.
Toll manufacturing with distillation and other steps
Distillation often sits inside a longer process: a reaction, then distillation, then a blend. Ask whether every step runs at the same site, and if not, who carries the material and the loss between sites.
Process safety
Distillation commonly involves flammable liquids. OSHA's process safety management standard, 29 CFR 1910.119, applies to a process with a flammable liquid with a flashpoint below 100 °F on site in one location in a quantity of 10,000 pounds or more, and to processes with listed chemicals at or above their threshold quantities. Under it the process hazard analysis is updated and revalidated at least every five years and compliance is certified at least every three years.
Ask whether your distillation would fall under the site's program, and how a new material is brought into it.
Source: OSHA, 29 CFR 1910.119 Process safety management of highly hazardous chemicals (read 30 Oct 2026)
Before you send a sample
Settle confidentiality and non-use first, then what to qualify in any blender.