it wasn't a litre, it was his loft studio ( commercial shooter ) and yes he was fined all that $$.
it hasnot a thing to do with what washes out of rocks in aquifers but what
the laws say. where i live used to have more electroplates than you can imagine
the costume jewelry capital of the world and the bay was a toxic waste dump. people dumped
their stuff down the drain for decades and it went into the bay, espeically if it rained
That sounds really severe for a sewer permit violation. I wonder if he was dumping direct to surface water, and so was subject to EPA enforcement rather than to the local municipality. Or perhaps ignored a sewer disconnect order or that sort of thing.
Regarding the local electroplaters, I'm guessing that they used something like silver nitrate such that the silver was mostly in ionic form, which is considered pretty bad for aquatic life. Photofinishing silver is a different animal, sometimes being reported as something like 10,000 to 20,000 times less toxic than ionic silver.
here's a bit from an early (1980ish) EPA Guidance Document (for photofinishing): page vi-21 "A principle constitutuent of the fix solution is the thiosulfate ion which forms a complex with silver. The silver-thiosulfate complex is stable (it has a dissociation constant of 3.5 x 10^-14) and non-toxic to fish (bioassay test showed no effect on fathead minnows after 96 hours of exposure to the silver thiosulfate complex at concentrations up to 50 mg/l as silver)."
For what it's worth, that 50 mg/l silver is a bit below what we normally consider the lower limit for an electrolytic silver recovery unit, but it's generally doable with a reduced current in a "terminal" desilvering operation.
Anyway, the normal photoprocessing silver is considered fairly benign, and it is thought that the overly stringent limits may have been set for a different form (ionic) of silver.
