six month pickup schedule ideas
If you are willing, here are some ideas that I use - I live within a 15 minute drive from my free hazmat drop off centre, but with youing kids and a family, finding time to get there with their busness hours is the issue.
For spent developer- D76, HC-110, Xtol most paper developer etc. , I put it out in my garage on a high out of the way shelf in a stainless steel tray ( think cateferia warming table tray) until it is a blackened fraction of what it once was. It might freeze a few times along the way, oh well.
By the times I get around to it, again, anything that was an ozidizer has oxidized, so the high BOD, which means the demand for consuming oxygen that the little bugs in your septic need to survive is gone. I ph balance it with any stop bath I have around before I flush it dowen the toilet.
For fixer, I fixer test it so that I don't use more than I have to, and also go with 2 bath fixing when doing FB printing. This minimizes fixer consumption. I also evaporate it. It goes on a high cabinet on the back of my garage that faces south, and is under the eaves far enough that sun hits it but rain can't. I end up with a crust or sludge. - If it gets to crusty, I just wet it a bit to turn it back to a sludge and spatula it into an empty mayonaise jar, etc.
For spent things that I don't dry, like my C-41 bleach, RA-4 blix, pmk pyro based developers, etc. I store them in well labelled empty 2L plastic pop (soda) bottles. There never seems to be a shortage of them in my neighbourhood when I go 'shopping' for them on recycling bin put out day.
The C-41 bleach I use is actually a C-22 ferricyanide based bleach, and I replenish it with itself 45mL a roll so that 2L gets consumed after I process 22 rols of film, which takes me quite a while. It is quite black by then. The early overspill from replenishing the bleach I hold aside to mix up with almost spent fixer to do my b&w print print reduction partial bleaching with.
For colour printing RA-4 I run a roller processor that I replenish the developer and blix in, to the tune of 20mL an 8x10. witha slot processor you would do the sam thing. This generates a lot less wet waste than using solutions one shot in a jobo. It would not be possible unless I landed the roller in the great price deal that I did. I top off the developer solution, that I store in a glass jug, with nitrogen, so that it does not oxidize in the bottle. I also run the first bath of the roller as a water bath to remove most of the overcoating dye before the paper hits the developer. I think that the absense of the dye in the partially used developer helps it to last longer before it konks out. I can usually make it about 10-12 weeks before the colure developer and blix poop out this way.
