1.4g of silver!

This is my first silver recovery from film scraps and fixer - I'm quite proud of myself right now

Film was cut in small pieces, dunked in paper developer, shaken for a few minutes, strained, washed and put in a heated NaOH solution to dissolve the gelatin. Then the silver particles were filtered out with a coffee filter, washed and dried. For the fixer I went with the steel wool method. The resulting powdered silver was again filtered out, washed and dried. I melted the powder with a propane torch. If I had flux the results would have been much better I guess. All is well though, as this is the first time I do this. I don't remember how much fixer I had, but I did pour it in a tray with a fan blowing over it for about two days in order to concentrate it. I tried boiling it, but it started changing color and smelling pretty bad. It was maybe about 2 liters if fixer or thereabouts before the evaporation. Probably 90% of the total yield came from the fixer.

Just thought I'd share...

At today's current price, you're at about 98 cents!

Are there any services that reclaim this for me?

I'm not interested in reclaiming my own silver, but if I could send my darkroom waste to a company that would reclaim it and give me a % of value of the reclaimed silver, I would start separating my silver-containing waste out. We do this exact thing at work for precious metals, but I have never heard of a company that would do that for darkroom waste. Business opportunity?

OP

be careful with the torch,
burnt-fumes from fixer coated silver is rather toxic.
a friend told me household bleach outdoors might work
but i don't know if it less dangerous ...


my waste hauler used to take my fixer ( 50 gallon road side drum )
and when he had it refined would send me a check.
a magnet or trickle tanks are pretty mindless and you can have it refined yourself.
(at least the magnet, if you are in canada, the trickle tank too )

Interesting silver recovery experiment. When you have enough silver, make a ring out of it.

jnanian said:

OP

burnt-fumes from fixer coated silver is rather toxic.

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The powder was washed before melting. I wanted to minimize impurities as well as avoid some exotic new compounds forming while I heated the lot.

JPD said:

Interesting silver recovery experiment. When you have enough silver, make a ring out of it.

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I was thinking the same thing. Maybe something photography themed

Could you make your own emulsion with it?

That's the next experiment. However, starting with silver nitrate instead of pure silver is way safer and easier. I'm not dissolving silver in acid at home...

tanner said:

I'm not dissolving silver in acid at home...

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THANK YOU !

you wouldn't know how many people post threads about doing this, and attempts are made to dissuade them

i appreciate your hard core enthusiasm and COMMON SENSE

While we're on the topic of safety - one should also be careful with powdered metals. I'm not sure if silver is toxic, but just don't snort it.

The silver is likely to be highly contaminated with sulfur compounds (amongst other things). You would also require very pure nitric acid, which is very nasty stuff. The silver + nitric acid reaction creates some particularly unpleasant fumes.

You'd be better off selling the silver "for melt" and getting pure Na nitrate from a chemical supplier.

I ran into this kind of discussion in my past as a sculpture teacher. People would come in with copper and want to melt it down to sell as copper....Or try to make bronze with it by adding tin. THe economy of fiddling with metal refining or melting it down or processing it is always a way to lose money unless you have a giant smelting business. Heating copper to melting temps in an oxygen rich atmosphere creates copper oxide, and they always ended up with 1/3 to 1/2 lost copper. It was always better to sell the scrap materials and buy what you want. You have to calculate btu's, joules, time, etc. consumed when doing this sort of thing. I imagine dribbling silver from the photo process at home is a similar way to lose time and money as well. Someone is St Louis had a Craigslist add about buying old X-ray film to scrap the silver from, I suppose on a large scale that might work, but it sounds like a lot of work for a few bucks.

I'm not doing this to reclaim money. It's just a neat thing to do.

Not that I have thought about this in the past, but....

Silver Nitrate and Silver Chloride.