Usually small leftovers from weighing them out or are stuck in the walls. Place into a container, dilute with water, and slowly add acid under N2 until you don’t observe H2 formation anymore.
Place a beaker of ice into an ice bath and carefully pour in your reaction mixture. It will spit up at you.
Your alkali metal should already be in anhydrous hexane or toluene since you’re washing off the oil. Add dry toluene, then wet toluene and eventually isopropanol, methanol, water, and finally dilute HCl to neutralize. Be very slow with potassium.
Add Celite into your reaction to adsorb the majority of it, then throw into a dedicated Chromium waste.
You can also add silica to adsorb, idk which one works better
Filter Pd/C over celite but make sure not to fully dry out the Pd. Always keep it moist! Immediately take the Pd/C/celite and dump into a separate waste container with water. Make sure to rinse anything that has touched Pd (spatula, flasks, etc) with water and dump into this waste.
Make sure the Pd/C waste container is always wet, add more water if necessary.