Silver deficit continues

I presume that the reason fthat film ued for xrays is declining in hospitals and not so much in industry is the need for minimizing exposure. digital sensors can be more sensitive and the pictures can be easily processed, however, a stedy supply of elcftricity and computer power is necessary. Silver halide may not be the main use of silver forever and use of silver as antibacterial textile seasoning may not take up the slack.

p.

ph said:

I presume that the reason fthat film ued for xrays is declining in hospitals and not so much in industry is the need for minimizing exposure

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Maybe that too. But aos, it's quicker, the data are available faster, the data are needed digital anyway so film is just a diversion to begin with, it's easier to file, less chance of data going missing, it's everywhere it needs to be without stuff needing to be mailed etc. It's not one reason; it's a whole package of arguments. Dosage is undoubtedly in there somewhere as well.

ph said:

I presume that the reason fthat film ued for xrays is declining in hospitals and not so much in industry is the need for minimizing exposure. digital sensors can be more sensitive and the pictures can be easily processed, however, a stedy supply of elcftricity and computer power is necessary. Silver halide may not be the main use of silver forever and use of silver as antibacterial textile seasoning may not take up the slack.

p.

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I asked an x-ray tech about the fairly large hospital's use of x-ray film on Wednesday, as she shot some pics of my insides and she laughed, saying they no longer used the stuff; it's all digital now.

if you look deep on FOMA's site. they do make dental x-ray film, and NDT (industrial) X-ray film, but don't show any Medical X-ray film. Mind you I imagine that in some places if they only have a plain X-ray setup, they might still get x-ray film from somewhere

I don't understand why people fear any kind of silver shortage? There's plenty of the stuff, There's a ever growing demand for silver as a financial instrument. It is lovely stuff, there's plenty available.

With color film it's mostly recovered by the processing.

Individual currencies fluctuations have a huge effect.

mshchem said:

I don't understand why people fear any kind of silver shortage? There's plenty of the stuff, There's a ever growing demand for silver as a financial instrument. It is lovely stuff, there's plenty available.

With color film it's mostly recovered by the processing.

Individual currencies fluctuations have a huge effect.

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I've read for years silver reserves would be depleted by the end of this decade. Some other sources push it out a little further. Gold mining is supposed to cease around 2070. I wonder if we are in the last decade or so of film. Who is going to buy film when it's 20 bucks a roll? It's crazy Fuji slide is like $30/roll. Who buys this stuff?

If I understand it right, Silver is often found along when mining with copper. Electric Vehicles push up demand for Copper, which may result in more copper mining, and greater pressure to extract the gold and silver out of the copper slag.

on the negative side of the equation, the RoHS rules for electronics have caused the replacement of the traditional 60/40 solder with Lead free solder which generally has a silver content, thus increasing demand for silver. Most e-waste "recycling" just grinds up the unwanted electronics and looks for the gold and copper content. it remains ot be seen if it will be economic to try and recover the tin (found in almost all Solder) and SIlver, along with the Lead from Pre RoHS electronics.

silver demand for many years has been met by a combination of fresh mined metal, and recovered and recycled metal.

and yes their is a lot of the stuffed mined.

the biggest e-waste smelter in canada does recover silver

"At Horne Smelter, we recover copper, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and other metals from such electronics"

and the silver is recovered from the copper anodes at CCR in Montreal:

see under "slime processing" and recovery of Precious metals. (remeber that they anodes are mostly form coper mines.

Todd Niccole said:

I've read for years silver reserves would be depleted by the end of this decade. Some other sources push it out a little further. Gold mining is supposed to cease around 2070. I wonder if we are in the last decade or so of film. Who is going to buy film when it's 20 bucks a roll? It's crazy Fuji slide is like $30/roll. Who buys this stuff?

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We've mostly been digging deeper and in a wider area and are not, in any way close to running out of raw Earth and Oceans to mine for Gold, Silver, Rhodium, and other valuable gems, metals and rocks.

Just as raw chemicals and metals nodules populate large areas of the oceans floors, an industry waiting to be harvested, with no idea yet what all the oceans contain.

A side note:

In 78-79, Typhoon Alice hit the Eniwetok Atoll and the main island, Eniwetok itself ended up with thousands of noduals covered the island runway and the width of the island, dragged up from the ocean floor by the powerful storm.

They were generally the same size, the same shape and looked to be the same material.

What they actually were I don't know and did not inquire because the just looked like round stones to me, but I did see them and know there are valuable examples causing much debate now, with companies currently vying with each other and National Governments about underwater mining, so future "deposits" of prescious metals like Silver, may just be on the menu of possibilities from this resource. IMO

Common Sense should tell people that these supplies have yet to be detected and that the same Terra that exist above water, exist in the vast spaces our oceans occupy.

Again, IMO.

cmacd123 said:

and the silver is recovered from the copper anodes at CCR in Montreal:

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Hi, seems like an interesting operation, although not explained in great detail.

But in the interest of not misleading photographers/processors it's completely different from photographic silver recovery. When ionic silver is electroplated it will plate out on the cathode (not anode). So in photography we can put a silver-bearing solution, such as fixer or bleach-fix, into a properly controlled electrolytic cell, then after electroplating "recover" the metallic silver from a cathode.

The cathode is frequently made of fairly thin stainless steel sheet, allowing the (potentially) high-purity silver (of sufficient thickness) to be flaked off by flexing the cathode. (Tapping a cylindrical cathode with a plastic hammer is a pretty typical operation once the silver plate has gotten thick enough.)

Mr Bill said:

in photography we can put a silver-bearing solution, such as fixer or bleach-fix, into a properly controlled electrolytic cell, then after electroplating "recover" the metallic silver from a cathode.

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For amusement's sake, I tried this. I used some spent blix and fix (a mixture of both) and two stainless steel spoons as the anode and cathode. I tried currents ranging from 50mA up to 2A. 'Something' happens alright; a very dark or black precipitate formed at the cathode, which could be colloidal silver, silver oxide and/or silver sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide gas also evolved - stinking up the place pretty badly.

The precipitate I tried dissolving in nitric acid - DO NOT TRY THIS IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING as it forms NOx which is particularly nasty; I did these experiments at a very small scale and with ample ventilation in steps that carried such risks. The precipitate dissolved to a large extent. I then recrystallized the formed nitrates by allowing the nitric acid to evaporate. The yield was phenomenally low, suggesting that the efficiency of the process was far below any meaningful level. Moreover, the purity of the silver nitrate seemed to be very poor as well.

I tried a carbon cathode instead of stainless, but the result was the same.

Which is to say it's not as straightforward as it may sound. There are some nice YouTube videos, including one of a German photographic silver recovery operation. What I got from my experiments is that all this is only sensible if it's done on a fairly big scale. I visited a major RA4 print lab last year and of course they do silver recovery, and successfully too, effectively closing the loop for color photographic paper.

It would be nice if all of us could and would take our spent fixer to one of the few remaining labs that we can in turn trust will send their fixer/blix off for silver recovery.

koraks said:

For amusement's sake, I tried this. I used some spent blix and fix (a mixture of both) and two stainless steel spoons as the anode and cathode. I tried currents ranging from 50mA up to 2A. 'Something' happens alright; a very dark or black precipitate formed at the cathode, which could be colloidal silver, silver oxide and/or silver sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide gas also evolved - stinking up the place pretty badly.

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Sorry, hope you didn't try this on my account; I could have probably told you this might happen.

See here... https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/used-sodium-thiosulfate-disposal.101991/page-4#post-1349249

I used the term a "properly controlled electrolytic cell" as a catch all. The number one thing you need is a large amount of circulation at the cathode. Without this you won't be able to get enough silver ions near the cathode. And the max current density is related to the silver content of the solution... at some point you have to taper off to the point where it is not worth continuing.

We did a pretty tremendous processing volume back in the day. During our peak rush season, for a couple of weeks each year, two full production shifts, we could plate out as much as 45 lb silver per 24 hours from RA-4 blix (which is far more difficult than fixer). During normal operation probable a bit less than half that amount. Going from distant memory.

No worries; I was aware of the pitfalls when I set up the experiment. I did this out of curiosity and to get a feeling for whether it would be sensible to pursue that path. I'm reasonably 'good with electronics', so building something that would work is certainly something I could manage. The main question I tried to answer for myself is whether it would have been worth it. I've come to the conclusion that with the amount of processing I do, it's not. I already knew/suspected this based on paper napkin exercises; there's just not much silver to work with to begin with in my kind of home-lab setup. Recovering it comes at the cost of an expense in time, materials and energy that will simply never justify the gains. Even from an environmental perspective, it's arguably better to simply dump my spent fixer down the drain than to try and recover the silver in it!

Mr Bill said:

Hi, seems like an interesting operation, although not explained in great detail.

But in the interest of not misleading photographers/processors it's completely different from photographic silver recovery.

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this based on anodes produced by a smelter. they contain a mix of metals. As I follow the process, the Anodes are plated out to the cathodes in a bath of some copper compund. . the copper cathodes are fairly pure and sent off to be made into copper products. Anything that is NOT copper ends up as a Sludge at the bottom of the electrolytic cell. that is melted into new anodes and sent to the precious metal refinery where a simalar process extracts the Gold and silver. the diagram on the page I posted does refer to "sludge" in a couple of places.

the material that forms the anodes is a mixture of copper from the mines in northern Quebec, PLUS the metals extracted from the ground up electronics. the mined material will have a mixture of Copper, Gold and silver.


I would guess that if the Horne smelter got dried fixer, it would basically turn it into sulfuric acid and the silver would end up in a copper anode.

the smelter was upgraded to capture the sulpher in the ores they process into acid rather that spewing them out as Acid Rain.