"Grounds for Sustainability" : Caffenol Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Dear friends and colleagues,

Briefly, before I describe the research in the title of this post: I want to express my eternal thanks to so many here who, without being otherwise aware of it, I owe a debt of gratitude for your having contributed to 15+ years of posts (first from APUG / Photo.net and now here) that made my academic work possible. I've lost count of how many times I came looking for an odd answer and found it. I'm currently teaching 16mm analog film production at UMass Amherst, having brought it back to life after many years on hiatus. Before that, I spent a decade doing my PhD on the chemical, mechanical, and optical aspects of photographic and cinematographic technology, focusing on two movements (International Pictorialism and French New Wave cinema) as case studies. Many of you are my heroes without knowing it (RIP Ron Mowrey) -- thank you all for blessing members such as myself who come here to the well of photographic knowledge to draw metaphorical water.

So to share some excitement: together with a colleague in Chemistry, I'm doing interdisciplinary research on coffee and phenol-based photographic developers. This year we received a $10,000 seed grant from UMass Amherst's School of Earth and Sustainability (which funded our purchase of a couple cases of 16mm Tri-X for our students) in order to process student film in Caffenol made from leftover dining hall coffee and grounds and in parallel do HPLC on it to assess caffeic acid content, which is ostensibly one of the primary active ingredients when used as a developer. In connection with this effort, we're working with the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps to talk with everyone from darkroom managers to end-users to suppliers like Photographer's Formulary about interest in eco-friendly, coffee-based developer.

As we start to make a list of contacts, please reply or message me, as we'd love to be in correspondence with anyone interested here, including:
1) end-users interested in sustainable film development, and
2) chemists and others with experience with regard to the chemistry of photography

Since I am but a humble practitioner, that second category will be a big help to my colleague in Chemistry -- I know Caffenol works, but I wouldn't be able to write out a photographic oxidation-reduction reaction without pulling out Mees!

I'm of course a member of the various FB developing groups and am in the middle of writing the founders of Caffenol.org about this effort. Just got off the phone with Dr. Scott Williams from RIT who to my knowledge did some of the first publicly-available university work on coffee development in 1995. Very excited to be pushing forward with this project!

David Bendiksen
Visiting Filmmaker, Film Studies Program
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Welcome, and I'll wish you the best in what you are doing.
And you are right, we are really a good place for finding an "odd answer".

I did some work with caffeic acid [not sure how pure] and concluded that it did not account for all the development in caffenol:
Good luck with your project.

'

This is nice, good luck with that project ! If I may, it would be really interesting to have some research on eco-friendly developers that does not rely on coffee, because there is way too little about them compared to caffenol. Some experiments including the little I did show that similar results can be achieved by using plants like sage, thyme, mint, and others instead of instant coffe, using the caffenol CM recipe as base. From an ecological and practical point of view, they make more sense.. Instant coffe is a really industrial component, caffenol smell pretty bad because of it, stain the reels and ruin fixer pretty quick. Plant-based developers are cleaner

I am not a coffee drinker so my sustainability path is to use replenished XTOL.

Okay. I'll take the risk of being called an asshole or a grinch. Having being forced by being housebound to watch dozens of YouTube videos made by know-nothings trying to make and use caffenol, plus having thumbed through The Caffenol Cookbook, itself the product of an extensive college study, my reaction to the original post was: "What a waste of $10,000. by a major university."

bendytwin said:

So to share some excitement: together with a colleague in Chemistry, I'm doing interdisciplinary research on coffee and phenol-based photographic developers. ... In connection with this effort, we're working with the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps to talk with .... suppliers...

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bendytwin said:

Just got off the phone with Dr. Scott Williams from RIT who to my knowledge did some of the first publicly-available university work on coffee development in 1995.

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I myself wanted to dive into the field of developer toxicology/environmental impact much earlier than that, but my career turned differently.

But of course the question comes up why no manufacturer so far came up with a commercial product, and why now a supplier/manufacturer should.
I assume you contemplated on this question too.

Randy Stewart said:

Okay. I'll take the risk of being called an asshole or a grinch. Having being forced by being housebound to watch dozens of YouTube videos made by know-nothings trying to make and use caffenol, plus having thumbed through The Caffenol Cookbook, itself the product of an extensive college study, my reaction to the original post was: "What a waste of $10,000. by a major university."

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WOW! What a Debbie Downer.

My wife works at a university deeply involved in research grants, many multi year, multi million dollar grants.

If the grantor sees something of value in the proposed research, it gets funded. Many are very competitive grants, with many research universities competing.

OP: First of all, welcome to Photrio.
Second, congratulations on obtaining the grant and I wish you and your colleague well in your research. Depending upon your results, you ,may receive additional funding to continue your research.

Or, you may qualify for a patent on the results of your research.

Coffee is dandy, but D76 is golden.

I wonder if the chicory coffee down in New Orleans would give a different look to the negatives?

I’ve been developing film in Beer (Beerenol or Beerol) for several years. I based my recipe off Caffenol. I admin a Flickr group called Beerol, most of the photos are mine but others do contribute. You’ll find my recipe in the discussions section.

Beerol

momus said:

Coffee is dandy, but D76 is golden.

I wonder if the chicory coffee down in New Orleans would give a different look to the negatives?

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XTOL and replenished XTOL are platinum.

This is fascinating. Good luck with your research. I did some HPLC work from time to time but nothing like what you are attempting. You're gonna need a LOT more money.

Trying to analyze coffee and isolate the effects of individual components will be a serious undertaking.

Most of us are working with 4 or 5 individual chemicals to mix a developer.

mshchem said:

This is fascinating. Good luck with your research. I did some HPLC work from time to time but nothing like what you are attempting. You're gonna need a LOT more money.

Trying to analyze coffee and isolate the effects of individual components will be a serious undertaking.

Most of us are working with 4 or 5 individual chemicals to mix a developer.

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Let's hope that this is just seed money to get him started. According to my wife, that is how many successful grants begin.

The proposal to repurpose left over coffee for developing film is nice. Would coffee by itself, i.e. without ascorbic acid, do a complete development if sufficiently long developing times (say overnight stand in a deep tank) are used?

bendytwin,
Are you in touch with Roy Cross in Montreal?

Cool effort! One thing though, I have serious doubts that caffenol is more environment friendly than pc developers unless you're in a position to have leftover coffee to use for it. Coffee production, at least if not organic, isn't great for the environment.

It is weird that nearly all responses by others have it about Coffee, whereas the OP also hinted at "phenol-based photographic developers".

I understood the latter as other natural developing agents of the phenolic kind.
Maybe you understood this instead as synthetic phenolic developing agents as counterpart to the ones in Coffee.

A

AgX said:

It is weird that nearly all responses by others have it about coffee

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Not really, I think, for a couple of reasons:
1. Coffee is a popular choice, so many people are familiar with it. More so than other 'natural' ingredients, I think.
2. Coffee is mentioned explicitly by the OP.
3. The research grant is specifically focused on (primarily) used coffee grounds as a waste stream from university facilities.

As such I think this grant fits in a broader pattern I see with grants tending to focus on socially-relevant topics, with anything related to sustainability being prime candidates for funding. You can make of that what you will, but it's a reality today in the research arena that if you want your proposal to have a chance, you better be very clear and explicit on its societal relevance.

Concerning the scope of the project: evidently there are a million other angles once could take on this topic, but you've got to start somewhere. Starting in a very obvious place is a reasonable choice, I think.

Wel, we had it here also often about other natural developing agents.

But if you are right, what then the OP is meaning with his wording? The second meaning I proposed?

So far sadly he has not chimed in again.

If they revisit this thread, I'm sure they'll want to explain. In their place I would argue that having a few degrees of freedom in the project will help if it doesn't progress as anticipated and/or to create a 'hook' for future projects to latch on to.

Randy Stewart said:

Okay. I'll take the risk of being called an asshole or a grinch. Having being forced by being housebound to watch dozens of YouTube videos made by know-nothings trying to make and use caffenol, plus having thumbed through The Caffenol Cookbook, itself the product of an extensive college study, my reaction to the original post was: "What a waste of $10,000. by a major university."

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Yeah, you knew better but you went ahead and posted it anyway. It's not too late to delete that bit of nastiness.

Personally very happy that a university will fund research on film anything, frankly.

Like everyone else I wish you best of luck with your project. I hope the operational word in this project is "multidisciplinary", because developing in instant coffee is a subculture, minimally affected by chemical reasoning. No offense intended. I have not visited for a while, and I think that I had made a post some time ago to a Caffenol-specific space in the Forums, but I cannot seem to find it.

Anyway, when one writes a grant or a patent application, there usually is a section called "prior art". A paper in J. Agric. Food Chem. 2006, 54, 5755 by ROMAN LANG, CHRISTOPH MUELLER, AND THOMAS HOFMANN analyzed concentration of various di- and tri-hydroxybenzenes in various beverages. There is Table 3 with results, which show that roasted coffee is way ahead of other sources (with malt a distant second) in the concentration of catechol and pyrogallol and their derivatives. The authors made model studies where various pure substances were subjected to what may be called "simulated roasting" and showed that catechol and pyrogallol were in fact generated by it from plant precursors. These two known developing agents will, of course, be destroyed during normal beverage preparation. If you find that spent coffee grounds still possess a film developing activity, I would be very interested in your results.

Thanks Pixophrenic.

A heartfelt thank-you to everyone for your enthusiasm and replies these past few months -- sorry for not being present here in discussion; I've just been busy with the teaching semester across the three colleges I'm at right now. My colleague in Chemistry recently got in the column and standards needed for analysis, so she'll be putting in some work on it this semester and I'll try to report back with results as we get them.