RA4 chemical disposal

[Maris]

Years ago when I had to submit house plans to get a building authority the plans included a photographic darkroom. This attracted alarmed attention from the local waste water treatment facility. So I did some calculations for them about the silver challenge they faced:

Photographic materials, to a rough approximation, average 1 gram of silver per 1 square metre.
I process about 1000 sheets 8"x10" paper or film equivalent in a year. That about 50 square meters of area.
If half the silver stays in the finished pictures and half goes out with the fixer (a reasonable assumption) then I send about 25g (about an ounce) of silver down the drain every year.
My household water usage is about 100,000 litres per year or 100,000,000 grams of water per year.
Simple division shows the average annual silver concentration I deliver is 0.25mg/litre. And that's just me.

The community I live in has a population of about 55,000 and no commercial photographic processing facility. The one and only lab closed years ago.
Unity Water, the local community water company, supplies about 3 trillion litres of water a year some of which irrigates lawns or washes cars but most goes down the drain as bath water, washing machine water, and toilet flushes. This further dilutes my 25g of silver. I did get my darkroom approved; no further worries.

 

[pentaxuser]

Fwiw pentaxuser would be perfectly justified to call me out on deviating so much from the original topic, and I would agree. I'm guilty (but will probably continue.)

Well I was only suggesting that a new thread be started on the general state of governmental/ municipal authorities attitude on the need to make special provisions for photographic chemical waste as it seemed to me that we had really exhausted the subject started by the OP

However what has struck me as relevant is the fact that disposal of such waste in a less than safe way may have been far more pertinent when the studies were done. In those days the volume of film and print processing bore no relationship to the amount processing that is done now in the iphone and digital era. In bygone days there was only film and darkroom printing. If you wanted to take pictures that was all that was available

In absolute terms all chemical waste needs to be disposed of in a way that renders it safe but in relative terms of its harm vis a vis other environmental issues it has moved into a lower league surely?

Oh, and before anyone reminds me, I am aware that film if not darkroom printing has seen a revival

pentaxuser

PS I was unaware of Maris' #51 until after I posted mine but in the broadest of terms his post would seem to reflect the reality of today's situation

 

[mshchem]

Years ago when I had to submit house plans to get a building authority the plans included a photographic darkroom. This attracted alarmed attention from the local waste water treatment facility. So I did some calculations for them about the silver challenge they faced:

Photographic materials, to a rough approximation, average 1 gram of silver per 1 square metre.
I process about 1000 sheets 8"x10" paper or film equivalent in a year. That about 50 square meters of area.
If half the silver stays in the finished pictures and half goes out with the fixer (a reasonable assumption) then I send about 25g (about an ounce) of silver down the drain every year.
My household water usage is about 100,000 litres per year or 100,000,000 grams of water per year.
Simple division shows the average annual silver concentration I deliver is 0.25mg/litre. And that's just me.

The community I live in has a population of about 55,000 and no commercial photographic processing facility. The one and only lab closed years ago.
Unity Water, the local community water company, supplies about 3 trillion litres of water a year some of which irrigates lawns or washes cars but most goes down the drain as bath water, washing machine water, and toilet flushes. This further dilutes my 25g of silver. I did get my darkroom approved; no further worries.

Yeah, I don't know if combined in a year film, prints etc have ever gone beyond this. I really have no place left to take blix or fixer as we have no labs left. My biggest concern is all the freaking plastic stuff. It's mind blowing walking through a grocery to see all the single use plastic containers. There's a lobby group.
I use RA4 one shot, most of the time I use a Kodak rapid color processor, it dumps directly into a sink, and down the drain. Sewage treatment takes care of my miniscule amounts of chemistry.