dig vs. analog on the environment

Aggie · Jun 17, 2005

A highly toxic and most probably contagious substance is homo sapien fecal debris. Without it some archeologists would have no evidence to recreate a society from. We are in a conundrum. Do we or don't we? Personally I will flush my toilet as opposed to other means of disposal.

jjstafford · Jun 17, 2005

Aggie said:
A highly toxic and most probably contagious substance is homo sapien fecal debris. [...]

I laughed so hard it hurt! Great thread killer.

removed account4 · Jun 17, 2005

for plating out silver, you can also use copper flashing, or just get a drum and dump your chemicals in there to wait for the water to evaporate, the sludge will have silver in it. i have all my photo-waste hauled away. waste haulers are listed in the yellow pages and it cost something like 30$ to pick up, and you get a check for the recovered silver which is about 20$.

dumping spent fixer into a septic system does a number on the bacteria that gobble up the "stuff" that goes in there, much the same way dumping a whole bunch of diswashing liquid or laundry detergent or cooking oil would do. heavy metals( photochemicals) in your ground water, or garden or stream if you live near a watershed is not a good thing. here's a little experiment --- get a fish tank and dump some chemicals in there to see how long the fish survive, probably not too long.

Aggie · Jun 18, 2005

Deficate in the fish tank, and i doubt those same fish would last long either.

Flotsam · Jun 18, 2005

jnanian said:
get a fish tank and dump some chemicals in there to see how long the fish survive, probably not too long.

To be proportional, it would have to be a tiny fraction of a mililiter of photo solutions in a very large fish tank. On the other hand, imagine how many hundreds of gallons of fertilizer, weed killer and bug killer an average Golf Course dumps directly into the ground in a season.

Flotsam · Jun 18, 2005

Aggie said:
Deficate in the fish tank, and i doubt those same fish would last long either.

Aggie, I would _never_ have done that if it weren't an emergency

removed account4 · Jun 18, 2005

Flotsam said:
To be proportional, it would have to be a tiny fraction of a mililiter of photo solutions in a very large fish tank. On the other hand, imagine how many hundreds of gallons of fertilizer, weed killer and bug killer an average Golf Course dumps directly into the ground in a season.

okay .. use an eye dropper

phfitz · Jun 19, 2005

Hi there,

Selenium is used in shampoo. Paraphenylene-diamine is used in hair dye. I really don't think either is too nasty.

Aluminum foil works very well in fixer to remove the silver. The silver falls out as a black dust and can be filtered and recycled, or just let it settle to the bottom and pour off slowly. It should work as well in color 'blix' but I have not tried that.

I think the whole digital - analog polution question is a major case of N.I.M.B.Y. The chemicals used in making digital parts are the most toxic on the planet and the landfill problem will not disappear anytime soon.

Good luck with it.

scottmillar75 · Jun 19, 2005

"The chemicals used in making digital parts are the most toxic on the planet "

Which chemicals exactly are used?

Scott

Jim Chinn · Jun 19, 2005

Flotsam said:
To be proportional, it would have to be a tiny fraction of a mililiter of photo solutions in a very large fish tank. On the other hand, imagine how many hundreds of gallons of fertilizer, weed killer and bug killer an average Golf Course dumps directly into the ground in a season.

X about 1 million. Consider the amount of chemicals placed on lawns in this country. I think the single biggest thing that could be done to decrease water pollution would be to limit the amount of these chemicals. probably the best way would be to place a high fee on the cost of each bag or liquid qty. to pay for clean up costs and discourage there use.

There are also many less toxic alternatives.

One way to help is to buy organic food products. my wife and I have been slowly switching over to as much organic as possible. The cost is not that much greater and in some cases equal to non-organic.

My wife does a lot of research on the web about the impact of consuming all this crap. Some scientists believe that the trend for children, especially girls to reach puberty at younger and younger ages as well as ADHD can be linked to consumption of growth hormones and antibiotics in cows milk. This does not even consider the future dangers of genetically engineered crops getting into the food supply.

The bottom line is if everyone who does not purchase organic would shift just 5% of their spending to organic, we would begin to see a real shift towards the production of these products and an equal reduction in the need for toxic substances introduced into the food chain.

This is all IMHO.

Leon · Jun 19, 2005

those who are recommending using wire wool or foil to reclaim teh silver out of fixers ... what do you do once the silver is out? I guess it forms on the wire wool, what do you do with the wire wool?

Flotsam · Jun 19, 2005

Leon said:
those who are recommending using wire wool or foil to reclaim teh silver out of fixers ... what do you do once the silver is out? I guess it forms on the wire wool, what do you do with the wire wool?

I've been wondering that too. With the tiny amounts of low quality Silver that I would be collecting in my very low volume operation, it certainly wouldn't be worth the effort of trying to reclaim it as metal.

Tom Stanworth · Jun 19, 2005

Flotsam said:
I don't tone my prints. Mainly because I am at least aware and concerned about my darkroom effluents but also because I understand that to achieve permenance, the print must be toned to finality which changes it's appearance much more than I like. I hope that I can find a paper to replace Polymax with the same great d-max so that I don't have to rely on toning to boost them.

Not sure I agree with that. I have heard that protection is only proportional to the amount of converted silver etc. However, dunk a print that has spent 3 mins in 1+19KRST in sepia bleach. Even a short amount of toning makes a hell of a difference. I found this out when reversing sepia/selenium split toning and started with teh selenium for the first time. 2 mins in KRST about 1+15 or so and my Oriental seagul was having nothing of that sepia bleach business...

Agfa viradon - supposedly only 45 second of toning required to convert over 90% silver......very quick and with many papers (esp cold ones) no real colour change in this time.

Aggie · Jun 19, 2005

the steel wool can be sold to companies like Hauser and Miller, or Rio Grande. I shouldn't say sold, they will give you cash back for your silver. I would suggest that you have a mass quantity of it before you send it in. The amount of silver that will plate out onto the steel wool, will probably cost you more in mailing costs, than you will receive back.

Leon · Jun 19, 2005

Aggie said:
the steel wool can be sold to companies like Hauser and Miller, or Rio Grande.

for those of us not on your side of the pond, what kind of Business to companies like Hauser and Miller do - what kind of companies would want to buy reclaimed silver?

Troy Hamon · Jun 20, 2005

Actually, the silver doesn't 'plate' on the steel wool. The silver compound in solution is relatively unstable compared to the same compound with iron in its place. What happens is the iron from the steel wool dissolves as it replaces the silver, and the silver collects like a black sludge at the bottom of the container. In theory, you could completely replace the steel wool with the black sludge, but most people would not go that far because the reaction is less and less efficient as the concentration of iron to silver is reduced. If you hook up two silver recovery chambers in serial you can fully exhaust the steel wool in the first before sending it off to a silver refinery, then move the second chamber to the first position and put a new one in the second position.

removed account4 · Jun 20, 2005

http://www.itronics.com/

Bighead · Jun 21, 2005

Lets not forget all of the crappy prints tossed out from digital users.....

Paul Howell · Jun 21, 2005

The amount of chemistry that I put down the drain is so insignificant to the wast water that is treated for the Phoenix area (Metro Phoenix has over 3 millions folks hanging out) I don't lose any sleep. Large scale users are required to reclaim silver in hypo, the military and other large scale users also reclaimed wast film and prints. In the old days when labs were for the most large industrial units that processed hugh amounts of film and prints it was much easer to enforce environmental rules than it is for hundreds of minilabs. The chip industry has left contaminated ground water, land fills full of computer and other electronic devices with residual heavy metals, what I do has a very small footprint.

sbuczkowski · Jun 21, 2005

scottmillar75 said:
"The chemicals used in making digital parts are the most toxic on the planet "

Which chemicals exactly are used?

Scott

While perhaps not a specific answer to your question, most high volume chip manufacture is done through chemical vapor deposition (CVD) or metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) crystal growth. The actual gases going in to the growth chamber will vary with the actual material/structure being grown, but most make anything in the darkroom look absolutely benign. Add to that the fact that the chemical reaction rates aren't all that high and you get most of the noxious gas you pump into the growth chamber coming out the other end as waste.

Then add to that the waste chemicals (acetone, trichlorethane, carbon tetrachloride, hydroflouric and hydrochloric acid being some of the common ones) produced in prepping your substrate for growth and prepping the device for etching and later growth stages.

I did some graduate work growing substrates with a slower, more benign growth system, but we still pumped out ridiculous amounts of chemical effluent just from substrate cleaning. All of that to grow 2-3 chips (less than 1/2" on a side) every week. If I started thinking about how that scales up to manufacturing levels, I'd lie awake at nights in a cold sweat.

Steven

B-3 · Jun 21, 2005

Bighead said:
Lets not forget all of the crappy prints tossed out from digital users.....

Right, cause nobody ever made crappy prints while using film.
:rolleyes:

Jorge · Jun 21, 2005

Bruce said:
Right, cause nobody ever made crappy prints while using film.
:rolleyes:

You got it! they just did not have enough perfection....

OTOH A few years back a friend of mine who went to the Cologne show told me something curios. He recounted how all the ink jet printer makers like Epson, HP etc, were putting out reams fo big photographs and how they would collect on the floor and people would just step on them, and he said; " you know, I recall the time when if you saw a print on the floor, not only you would not step on it, but you would make sure to pick it up"

It seem that even is they are fine photographs, they dont have much intrinsic value......

B-3 · Jun 24, 2005

But if I could get an inkjet print with the authenticated foot print of the artist, I bet my kid's college education would be paid for...

dig vs. analog on the environment

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