RA4 chemical disposal

Robbie · Apr 13, 2022

I’ve just started printing and I need to clean out my nova tank. I live in Glasgow and can’t seem to find chemical disposal and I’m just wondering what everyone does with used chemicals. Someone on a Facebook group told me most chemicals are safe to go down the drain (unless you have a septic tank) if you dilute them but I’d feel safer asking here. Any help, as always, would be appreciated.

AgX · Apr 13, 2022

You can approach this from two sides:
-) what you, your peers or science consider appropriate
-) what your local authorities say

"can’t seem to find chemical disposal"
You are from the UK, and I thought any EU (or ex-EU) country by now offers local (county etc.) special waste disposal facilities for consumers in one way or the other.

Robbie · Apr 13, 2022

AgX said:
You can approach this from two sides:
-) what you, your peers or science consider appropriate
-) what your local authorities say

"can’t seem to find chemical disposal"
You are from the UK, and I thought any EU (or ex-EU) country by now offers local (county etc.) special waste disposal facilities for consumers in one way or the other.

This is the problem, I can’t find anything from my local council. I’ve been topping up 20ml every time I print so they’re in bottles right now but now I’m around the 10 print mark so there’s over 3 litres worth. I am asking because I’m at a bit of a loss.

AgX · Apr 13, 2022

A phone call to the environmental department of Glasgow municipality should give an answer.

(At my town, twice a year for 3 hours a collecting truck stays at a central point, taking chemical stuff for free. Aside of this I can bring in stuff paid each weekday at a county collecting station.)

Robbie · Apr 13, 2022

Robbie · Apr 13, 2022

That’s my local council

jnamia · Apr 13, 2022

Crohnsie said:
I’ve just started printing and I need to clean out my nova tank. I live in Glasgow and can’t seem to find chemical disposal and I’m just wondering what everyone does with used chemicals. Someone on a Facebook group told me most chemicals are safe to go down the drain (unless you have a septic tank) if you dilute them but I’d feel safer asking here. Any help, as always, would be appreciated.

Hello

Please do not listen to people of Facebook, people here, or anyone else who suggests it is OK to dump photochemistry down your drain, it's not good and will seep into groundwater and foul up wildlife. You might consider finding a mini lab or photo lab (commercial) near you and see if you can strike up a working relationship with them so they take your photo chemistry if you can't find a way to legally dispose of it. I have always kept away from color darkroom work because I have no legal way to dispose of it ( although I do have a relationship with my local mini lab and was going to do what I just suggest you do ) I also do not do any work with toners for the same reason, they are nasty chemicals, no matter what people on Facebook or photography websites try to convince you. For years I have heard suggestions that all these things are "harmless" for one reason or another, but I assume people say these things because they fly under the radar and don't want to be the only people dumping their cr@p down their drain, so they spread their guilt to other people to make all chemical based photographers look bad.

best of luck
John

miha · Apr 13, 2022

What John says. BTW, John, welcome back!

pentaxuser · Apr 13, 2022

Crohnsie , I'd contact the local council by phone and insist on speaking to someone who has knowledge of waste disposal and ask that person what facilities are provided for the disposal of chemicals in small quantities . I have no idea of the rules governing photographic waste in Scotland but there must be some provision for household chemicals at local household recycling centres

What you will be dumping in terms of amounts and concentrations bears no relationship to what might constitute a special uplift or so I'd have thought.

What counts as AgX has said is what does your council regard as constituting chemical waste

pentaxuser

Sirius Glass · Apr 13, 2022

I am allowed to put mine down the drain, however when I have a larger amount I take it to a toxic waste disposal collection site.

Maris · Apr 13, 2022

In my opinion, and it is opinion only, Chronsie, you can put your chemistry down the drain. Chase it with a bit of extra water so it gets out of your pipes and into the sewerage system. Here's why:

Glasgow has a modern reticulated sewerage system where sewage does not get out into the environment (no fish or animals are harmed) but rather it goes to an activated sludge based treatment plant at Renfrew Road next to the River Clyde.
Most modern cities allow about 150 litres of waste water (black and grey) per citizen per day which works out, in Glasgow's case, to about 255 million litres per day. The Nova chemical volume (which is mainly water anyway) is so miniscule compared to this vast volume of daily waste water that it is undetectable by any analytical method biological or chemical. By the time this water is digested in the activated sludge tanks no detectable trace of original chemistry survives in the ultimate release to the environment.

So why this anxiety about chemistry down the drain? It is true that industrial scale photo manufacturing, think the Kodak industrial complex in Rochester, or a major photo processing laboratory before the digital age could produce enough effluent to overwhelm a local sewage treatment plant. The answer in cases like this was always pre-treatment before discharge. The tiny amount of waste from amateur scale photo processing done by the few people who have still not gone digital has got to be insignificant.

In a previous career as a scientist and environmental analyst in Australia I had many occasions to deal with the operators of sewage treatment plants. None of them, from lab-tech to laboratory manager, ever worried about photo-waste in the effluent streams they were treating. It was a non-problem compared to disasters like foam eruptions caused by too many people running their washing machines on the same day.

AgX · Apr 14, 2022

Maris said:
So why this anxiety about chemistry down the drain?

Well, in my case it is illegal. Authorities consider any spent photographic bath as waste and argue that waste may not be disposed of in the sewage.

This is independant on the kind of sewage treatment.

Of course one may argue: Who can prove if I do nonetheless. And practically there is no proof.

mshchem · Apr 14, 2022

Maris said:
In my opinion, and it is opinion only, Chronsie, you can put your chemistry down the drain. Chase it with a bit of extra water so it gets out of your pipes and into the sewerage system. Here's why:

Glasgow has a modern reticulated sewerage system where sewage does not get out into the environment (no fish or animals are harmed) but rather it goes to an activated sludge based treatment plant at Renfrew Road next to the River Clyde.
Most modern cities allow about 150 litres of waste water (black and grey) per citizen per day which works out, in Glasgow's case, to about 255 million litres per day. The Nova chemical volume (which is mainly water anyway) is so miniscule compared to this vast volume of daily waste water that it is undetectable by any analytical method biological or chemical. By the time this water is digested in the activated sludge tanks no detectable trace of original chemistry survives in the ultimate release to the environment.

So why this anxiety about chemistry down the drain? It is true that industrial scale photo manufacturing, think the Kodak industrial complex in Rochester, or a major photo processing laboratory before the digital age could produce enough effluent to overwhelm a local sewage treatment plant. The answer in cases like this was always pre-treatment before discharge. The tiny amount of waste from amateur scale photo processing done by the few people who have still not gone digital has got to be insignificant.

In a previous career as a scientist and environmental analyst in Australia I had many occasions to deal with the operators of sewage treatment plants. None of them, from lab-tech to laboratory manager, ever worried about photo-waste in the effluent streams they were treating. It was a non-problem compared to disasters like foam eruptions caused by too many people running their washing machines on the same day.

This is very good advice. If you find a place to take Bleach-Fix and fixer you won't be putting silver in the drain, of course with color printing all the silver is in the blix, black and white silver forms the image. As little as I use stuff goes to the waste treatment plant through the sanitary sewer. Never dump anything into a septic system that has heavy metals, like silver

jnamia · Apr 14, 2022

Crohnsie said:
mshchem said:

This is very good advice.

Click to expand...

Is it ?

Maris does not live in Glasgow and if the OP takes his advice and it doesn't "go well" is Maris going to pay his fine or take the blame for the problems that might happen? Doesn't sound like good advice to me, but I guess if the OP doesn't want to call the department he quoted and find out what he should actually do, it's something that is a lot easier than finding out what his responsibilities as a low volume waste generator might be.

Op. good luck with your chemistry...

nbagno · Apr 14, 2022

Here is some guidance from the EPA for the US. I know it doesn't help you in Glaskow, but this always comes up. Local ordinances with have their own requirements.

Richard Searle · Apr 14, 2022

I'm in England and I take my spent chemicals to my local recycling site. There's nothing there that they don't recycle.

mshchem · Apr 14, 2022

I wonder what the authorities do with this stuff? I would be surprised if the local folks would do anything other than send it to a higher level.
I worked in the appliance industry. I was involved with the conversion away from ozone depleting and global warming chemicals.
Weird things would happen with old refrigerators. Some jurisdictions mandated recycling, where no facilities existed. Huge graveyards appeared full of old appliances.
In the USA, typically the cabinets of refrigerators were shredded in automobile scrap yards steel was recovered with magnets the rest went to a landfill.
Now, if you have a refrigerator that is still functional, the local electric company will come take it away. These are stripped, metal recovered, plastic and glass goes to a landfill, the foam insulation, which contains CFC, HCFC, HFC chemicals are bagged and sent by truck to 1 or 2 special incinerators that burn the foam. HF among other gases are released, these don't harm the ozone.

Bottom line, don't make the stuff to begin with, because there's no good way to get rid of it. Thus I dump my developer and blix down the sewer.

Maris · Apr 14, 2022

Just for completeness I thought it might be interesting to consider what happens when photo-chemical waste is taken to an official recycling or disposal site.

Firstly, no hazardous waste facility I have ever worked with in a professional capacity has had a special policy concerned with photo-chemical waste. Compared to really poisonous stuff darkroom waste is of no account and gets no fancy treatment. In modern hazardous waste management there are only four basic pathways:

1. Sealed landfill. The problem here is that the hazard remains concentrated and may be dug up even hundreds of years later to harm people. Or the seal could fail leading to contaminated ground water.
2. High temperature incineration. This destroys organics but disperses inorganics up the smokestack to settle back into the environment at a harmlessly low concentration. That's the hope.
3. High temperature incineration at sea. This process conducted under the London Convention avoids land contamination but has its own expenses, controversies and critics.
4. Disposal into a sewage treatment plant. The activated sludge, aeration, and chlorination stages take care of the Biological Oxygen Demand, Chemical Oxygen Demand, and bacteriological load of the effluent. Metals are dispersed by precipitation and the enormous dilution factor of the process.

I can't know what happens to the sample of photo-chemical waste you take to your local disposal facility but I'd bet they likely pour it down the drain or bury it. Those are the cheapest options. I've seen a culture of secrecy in the hazardous waste processing industry. That's not surprising considering the anxieties involved. And politicians as warriors for the environment can influence the rules too.

jnamia · Apr 14, 2022

Culture of secrecy ?

Sorry, I don't think its a massive conspiracy. The people that regulate this stuff regular it for a reason, maybe you don't like the reasons? you should go into politics and change the laws to suite your tastes ...
where I live, people that do not follow the can be deemed "non compliant" and fined. A colleague of mine, who incidentally has left the commercial photography business and now runs a museum, was fined $10,000 / day for 10 days for being non complaint.

it would be a real shame if people who wanted to do the right thing read posts on this website (or anywhere else) and they decided not to find out what was legal near them, and instead dumped their waste down the drain and got into trouble for it. will you or others who suggest dumping stuff down the drain be there to pay their fines? ( if it ends up being illegal and they get caught).

mshchem · Apr 14, 2022

It's not a conspiracy. Usually it's mostly a lack of understanding. Big picture.

mshchem · Apr 14, 2022

Crohnsie said:
That’s my local council

So my lack of communication skills. A special uplift is a special pickup?

AgX · Apr 15, 2022

Maris said:
Firstly, no hazardous waste facility I have ever worked with in a professional capacity has had a special policy concerned with photo-chemical waste.

In the EU longtime there are dedicated codes for sorts of waste. For spent photographic baths alone there are 5 different codes. So at taking in ones bath labelled this way the people should know which recycling path it has to go.

Problem is the low influx of such stuff today.

Best approach to start from is reducing the amount of spent bath by replenishing. As the OP does!

jnamia · Apr 15, 2022

mshchem said:
It's not a conspiracy. Usually it's mostly a lack of understanding. Big picture.

The clean water act was done because of a lack of understanding ? Nothing is a big picture like a toxic waste dump, rivers on fire, massive fish kills blue lawns, and people who get sick, and die from contaminated water and chemical exposure. I've got more to say but I'd rather not pollute this thread with my thoughts ..

AgX · Apr 15, 2022

To get back to our issues: At this forum typically Silver-ions are seen as great hazard.

The same time industry over the last years introduced products releasing Silver-ions. And there is a study showing that Silver-ions are less a danger to environment than typically stated.
In this context I can understand mshchem's remark on the big picture.

That is why I worded my reply of post #2 as I did.

mshchem · Apr 15, 2022

jnania said:
The clean water act was done because of a lack of understanding ? Nothing is a big picture like a toxic waste dump, rivers on fire, massive fish kills blue lawns, and people who get sick, and die from contaminated water and chemical exposure. I've got more to say but I'd rather not pollute this thread with my thoughts ..

I agree 100% with you. Fixer should be treated to remove silver. Where I live that happens in our municipal waste water treatment facilities.
We have a waste collection facility where every couple years I take batteries, old paint, etc. I've even found for free some photo chemicals someone left at the facility for reuse.

RA4 chemical disposal

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