Is this environmentally responsible?

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I enjoy Borut Peterlin doing his wet plate collodion work. Is his method of removing silver environmentally responsible?

https://youtu.be/-35O6cE92qo

 

[Gerald C Koch]

YES

I am glad that he does not try to recover the silver by converting it back to silver nitrate. Many old-time photographers had spectacular explosions in attempting to do this. Some were actually killed. What they made was silver fulminate which is so shock sensitive that no use has ever been found for it.

 

[ic-racer]

Probably no more so than this (picture shows a Silver Iodide cloud seeder attached to a plane).

 

[whlogan]

They did pave the way for fulminate of mecury and many uses have been found for that .... those of us who participated in the SE Asian War Games in 1961-1975 found many uses for that stuff as well as amonium iodide which was a fun explosive to play with in the Delta, having done so myself as a second place winner in those Games.... Logan

 

[Gerald C Koch]

They did pave the way for fulminate of mecury and many uses have been found for that .... those of us who participated in the SE Asian War Games in 1961-1975 found many uses for that stuff as well as amonium iodide which was a fun explosive to play with in the Delta, having done so myself as a second place winner in those Games.... Logan

Mercuric fulminate is somewhat more stable than the silver compound. It can be used as the primary explosive in bombs. In college I had quite a bit of fun with nitrogen triiodide. Recent work at very low temperatures where it is stable have determined that the structure of this substance is rather complicated and nor really NI3.