reusing water

The ilford less water used process works fine,, however it still takes up water.

Few years ago a guy posted online about how he was using carbon filters from fish tanks to recirculate the wash water, and was using the same 20 gallon tub of wash water for a year at a time.

My question is, has anyone actually tested the wash water OR any processes to filter out residual chemicals?

Technically the FIXER is supposedly going to get "all" left over silver from the film or paper, but whats left will "all" come out when dunked in hypowash. So im just wondering

Activated-Carbon filter, next to their rather mechanical effect, may interact chemically or catalytically with some molecules. For the rest may remain physical effects of small molecular forces. But they are not universal. Especially anorganic substances may slip through.

Of all the materials needed to produce a photograph, unless processing in Death Valley, the cheapest and most plentiful one is water. Once upon a time I had a darkroom with no water supply and stored water in jugs. Final wash in bathtub.
One oddity I have noticed among some contributors to this site. Some folks will drop undress, sometimes thousands, of $$$$$ on a lens that they will most likely use less than ten times in their lifetime, but will complain about a slight increase in a roll of film or their favorite chemical.

Even if you're in Death Valley, you can dilute a developer like (Pa)Rodinal, use a water stop, mix one-shot fixer, and wash, with about one gallon of water. If you're so short of water that prevents you from processing your film, you might want to consider a different hobby.

Now for prints, you'll inevitably need more water, and that's where filtration and stretching use of the same water makes some sense. Still, though, if twenty gallons for a print session is causing you a problem, you might have to reconsider your priorities...

I may be wrong but while the OP has not stated this, I suspect he is concerned about the use of water as a precious resource. Except in desert regions or areas of the world still relying ion water pumps for the whole community it would seem that price-wise water is still very cheap

Some would argue that it is too cheap in relation its future supply. There is no doubt that it will be a diminishing resource as we move into the future. Like most of humanity I too tend to be careless at times with my use of water in many ways.

pentaxuser

Still, I'd argue that for film, there's so little to gain by attempting to reuse less than a gallon per roll of wash water that it's not worth the resources needed to filter or repurify (which requires energy input and produces pollution of its own, possibly in a more pernicious form than highly dilute fixer).

Once again, for prints, which necessarily use more wash water, it's potentially worthy of consideration -- but even so, one might consider showering less frequently (or not at all, in favor of cat-bath style washing with small quantities of water) as an equally or more viable alternative for reducing water waste. Reducing the waste in showers has far greater potential, because far more people shower than wash prints...

As mentioned, developing film uses very little water. Washing the film though does of course use quite a bit of water even w/ the Ilford method. RC papers just need a couple of minutes under running water, so not much there either.

There's a big misunderstanding regarding water resources, which are always 100% local. If I save water in Arizona it has zero effect on someone in North Carolina, much less someone in Europe. There are places on earth that get way too much water, some places don't get enough. It's not as if my using too much water washing film or papers is going to affect anything, not compared to industrial businesses that use huge, huge amounts of water.

Water that goes down the drain doesn't fall off the face of the earth either, it's sent to water treatment facilities that put most if it right back into our water taps at home. The whole earth is a water recycling facility, w// water evaporating from lakes, oceans, etc into the clouds and coming right back in the form of rain.

The real problem, the one that governments don't want to address, is that there are too many people on earth. Get that knocked down to where it should be and sustainability can happen. Otherwise.......

California is pumping aquafiers dry to grow walnuts. I suppose converting sea water is in the near future over there.

Me, I use the Ilford method. Well water and it goes back to the ground thru a septic field.
Eco-Pro replenished down the drain and the occasional Rodinal and HC110 and fixer goes in a waste jug for disposal in a municipal system with a treatment plant.

I gave up worrying about the amount of silver that the Eco-Pro carries with it down the septic and maintain a healthy bacteria culture there with some monthly doses of suitable additives.

Auer said:

California is pumping aquafiers dry to grow walnuts. I suppose converting sea water is in the near future over there.

Me, I use the Ilford method. Well water and it goes back to the ground thru a septic field.
Eco-Pro replenished down the drain and the occasional Rodinal and HC110 and fixer goes in a waste jug for disposal in a municipal system with a treatment plant.

I gave up worrying about the amount of silver that the Eco-Pro carries with it down the septic and maintain a healthy bacteria culture there with some monthly doses of suitable additives.

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The problem is, on on septic as well. And the nearest waste water plant is a 90 mile trip. And they dont want to talk about waste water with me.

You might dive into the depths of Apug, as the topic of darkroom effluents is a regular one. We even talked about designing a complex filter for spent baths and amateur use, basically what you are looking for.
Long time member Photo Engineer once uttered such idea, and there was discussion on it, but he himself lost interest no other took over.
Maybe here the topic came up for the first time:
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/filtering-used-water.41319/#post-591100

Keep also in mind that many of us have a kind of local service, even for free, that takes over spent baths. One just has to collect them and bring them in. What of course reduce the pressure on developing a filter system.

However cleaning wash wash-water never was a topic as far as I remember. The approach was, when needed, to apply a washing regime that involves little water from the start, think of cascade washing.

bunktheory65 said:

My question is, has anyone actually tested the wash water OR any processes to filter out residual chemicals?

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Back in the 1980s, when all the effluent regulations were hitting hard, there was a lot of research done on ways to deal with the effluent. An outfit called Pacex, as I recall, actually marketed a system to treat and reuse a substantial amount of the waste water. Using an ion-change column among other things. None of these systems make economic sense provided that you already have an adequate supply of water and a way to get rid of it.

The link that AgX supplied talks about a similar thing. (The user Photo Engineer, aka PE, spent much of his working career in the Kodak Research Labs, so when he says, "we did..." he is talking about Kodak.) The way that these things typically worked was that the manufacturers, such as Kodak, Fuji, Konica, Agfa, etc., wanting to continue selling their products, did the basic research to deal with various problems, published information about same, and then various companies would manufacture equipment to apply these technologies. But most of that infrastructure, or whatever you wanna call it, is long gone.

Regarding wash water, and the testing, etc., wash water is gonna get used fixer, including silver, in it. (Every time you move wet film from one tank to the next, some of the previous solution comes along with it.) There is no simple way to "filter" these things out. Your main concern is gonna be with the silver in both your fixer and the wash water. In the US there is a law called RCRA which defines what they call a "hazardous waste," which includes silver-bearing liquids with more than 5 milligrams per liter of silver in it. Now, it doesn't take much to get even your wash water over that limit so you should get familiar with those aspects. I'm not sure, but Ithink that RCRA has "small user exemptions" where a so-called small user might be ok with, for example, hundreds of gallons per month. But I am just making a wild guess on this - you are the one that is gonna be responsible for any problems. Personally I never dealt with that sort of thing, if you had a local sewage treatment plant then they could probably take care of your waste water (you have to know what the local regulations are), and the RCRA laws wouldn't even enter into this.

Ha! Most of you couldn't drink a mouthful of Death Valley water! Try it at home. Put some Boraxo powder soap in your next glass of water. Photographic use would be hopeless without a water distiller. Nice thing there is you wouldn't have any trouble boiling the water for distillation. Just put a mirror under the tank. But then when you go to develop the film, you'd end up with boiled gelatin soup instead of an image anyway. Some of that desert water is so heavy with silicates too that it will instantly and permanently bond to anything glass, including a lens.

There are a few springs involving snowmelt from much higher up on Telescope Peak above Death Valley. Somebody will eventually discover bits of your skeleton here and there in the dunes or salt flats trying to get there, with your daylight developing ABS tank a few beakers scattered nearby. The vultures will already have pecked away the jerky.

Donald Qualls said:

Even if you're in Death Valley, you can dilute a developer like (Pa)Rodinal, use a water stop, mix one-shot fixer, and wash, with about one gallon of water.

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Donald Qualls said:

Once again, for prints, which necessarily use more wash water...

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Hi Donald, if you look up the Kodak Z manuals for both color film and paper processing you'll find specs for water usage in processing machines. If the wash system uses two or more "countercurrent flow" wash tanks the rates are equivalent to roughly 1.5 liters of water per nominal roll of film. And for the color paper (which is all RC), again using two countercurrent flow tanks, the spec rate is about 600 mL per square foot of paper. An 8x10 inch print is roughly one-half of a square foot, so the wash rate is equivalent to roughly 1/3 liter per 8x10" print. And if gets much lower for 3, or even 4, such tanks.

So it's possible to reduce water usage much more than is commonly supposed. Now I understand that most people don't have such a processing machine, but the same principles apply if one uses several trays of wash water in sequence. (You could even replenish by using a "turkey baster," or the like, to move the appropriate amounts of wash water from tank to tank.) But for the most part someone working this way is on their own unless their manufacturer specifically says it's ok. When I say "on their own" I mainly mean that the manufacturer may not back them up with potential future image stability problems. So if you do this commercially you'd wanna make sure you follow their exact procedures. One last point is that these commercial processing machines use squeegees to reduce solution carryover between tanks, and the wash rates consider this. So without squeegees one would need higher replen rates, or whatever (it's up to the user to make sure the washing is good enough).

For those of you interested in using activated carbon, check this URL. https://justinrichards.xyz/blog/reduced-water-usage-print-washer/
I picked this up from Lina's site https://www.linabessonova.photography/videos#/archival-washing/

Reuse it in the garden or to flush your toilet...after removing all the surface fixer and/or HCA from the film.

Old_Dick said:

For those of you interested in using activated carbon, check this URL. https://justinrichards.xyz/blog/reduced-water-usage-print-washer/
I picked this up from Lina's site https://www.linabessonova.photography/videos#/archival-washing/

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Those are the links i found that made me pose this question. Contacting that guy has not gotten any results, and after the time of the posting and now,, i dont he exists anymore.

And how did they determine THIOSULFATE was the only contaminant in the wash water?

The thiosulfate (fixer) is the contaminant in the prints that one uses the wash water to remove.
The goal of that filtration was to remove from the wash water the fixer that has diffused out of the print into the wash water, in order to be able to re-use that water and have more fixer diffuse out of additional prints.

bunktheory65 said:

And how did they determine THIOSULFATE was the only contaminant in the wash water?

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He just did not care for other contaminates.

Reason is that resting Thiosulfate is generally considered
-) the most critical residue of processing
-) the most difficult to remove

guangong said:

Of all the materials needed to produce a photograph, unless processing in Death Valley, the cheapest and most plentiful one is water. Once upon a time I had a darkroom with no water supply and stored water in jugs. Final wash in bathtub.
One oddity I have noticed among some contributors to this site. Some folks will drop undress, sometimes thousands, of $$$$$ on a lens that they will most likely use less than ten times in their lifetime, but will complain about a slight increase in a roll of film or their favorite chemical.

Click to expand...

You are missing the point. water is relatively cheap but, the water you pay for is not yours. It belongs to us all and, we ask you to use it responsibly.

Old_Dick said:

For those of you interested in using activated carbon, check this URL. https://justinrichards.xyz/blog/reduced-water-usage-print-washer/

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Dick, I don't believe activated carbon will adsorb thiosulfate. Just to confirm in literature i looked through some old effluent data... there is a US EPA study from 1976 that touched on the effect of activated carbon on photo effluent. It listed components that CAN be treated and some that CANNOT. On the CANNOT list was sodium thiosulfate. Additionally I have personal experience with large quantities of color paper blix, which uses ammonium thiosulfate. In a previous process we used activated carbon in large quantities - 55 gallon drums (yes, there was a special purpose for this at the time). We also ran chemical analysis for thiosulfate, among other things (the Blix was being regenerated). We did not see any changes in the thiosulfate concentration when circulating through the drum of activated carbon.

So... I have no idea how that other guy came to the conclusion that activated carbon will remove thiosulfate. I don't want to demean what he was doing, but when this sort of thing comes to photrio I think it ought to be disputed. The guy who originally got the idea can defend it if he wants, but I'm real doubtful there is any real basis for it.

I'm gonna quote a bit about the Pacex system i mentioned; it's from a 1984 paper in one of the SPSE journals, just to give an idea of the sorts of things involved.

In such a process, an anion-exchange resin removes silver thiosulfate complex from solution. An oxidizing agent subsequently oxidizes residual thiosulfate to sulfate and a biocide minimizes biological growth. A filter removes unwanted sediment. Depending on the process, reduction in washwater usage from 50-80% may be possible.

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Yes, based on what I posted myself at the start of this thread I was surprised on his results.
Thus yesterday I looked a bit at filtering characteristics of activated carbon, and was even more surprised not to find immediately respective listings. What I well found was the extraction of Gold-Thiosulfate complexes by means of activated carbon filters. Which made his results plausible.
Now Bill, our expert at Apug on industrial film processing, negates the effectiveness of activated carbon on Silver-Thiosulfate.


Back to that darkroom experiment:

Well, what he did was taking samples of processed paper out of his washing stage during washing, testing them fore residual Thiosulfate. First he used just recirculating water. Then at a new run he put an activated carbon filter plus added coarse particle filter into the recirculation tubing. He then at his sampling saw a significant rise in paper area he could process until he reached the same Thiosulfate limit as before.
From this he drew the conclusion that his filter adsorbed Thiosulfate from the recirculating water.
However he did not test the water itself.

Another explanation thus could be that he changed unnoticed by himself his fixing regime. Leaving less unsoluable thiosulfate complex in the paper. Thus the paper was better washable so to say when it entered the washing stage.
Though he seems to have conducted the unfiltered approach for some time. With constant results? Or did he stopped testing after once having stablishrd a limiting area he could wash, and a variatin in fixing could have been unnoticed?

Anyway, you see even such seemingly basic experimemt must be well planned. In this case testing the water itself and testing the paper at entry into the washing stage comes to my mind.


Maybe we have an expert on activated carbon filtration here, to discuss this filtration issue more in debth.

RalphLambrecht said:

You are missing the point. water is relatively cheap but, the water you pay for is not yours. It belongs to us all and, we ask you to use it responsibly.

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Water doesn’t just disappear. Used water returns to sewage purification plants, and then is recycled., or in my specific case, to my septic tank, from which it eventually re-enters the ground

The amount of water used to wash a roll of film is roughly the same as one flush of the toilet, probably less than one flush when using the "Ilford Method". If one is concerned with saving water, you could probably just reuse your wash water to fill the toilet tank.

Now if you live in a desert region, recycle your water and use a composting toilet, trying to filter and reuse wash water may be worthwhile.

I think some people concerned about using water don’t understand the water cycle.

juan said:

I think some people concerned about using water don’t understand the water cycle.

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Nobody claimed that the water leaves the planet. But even in areas with plentiful water, getting it to your house takes energy and so does wastewater treatment. And the latter as usually far from producing drinkable water. In many areas, water resources are declining, no matter the global water cycle.
But I do agree that film washing doesn't pose great potential for water saving if one is already using the Ilford method.