Toronto Imageworks no longer developing film

spoolman

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I don't know if this is already known,but when I went onto T.I.W.'s website yesterday it stated that as of April-29-2021 they are no longer processing film.

Doug
 

MultiFormat Shooter

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spoolman said:
I don't know if this is already known,but when I went onto T.I.W.'s website yesterday it stated that as of April-29-2021 they are no longer processing film.
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I didn't, and I will say that anytime we (the film photography community) lose a source of processing (or other support), anywhere in the world, it's a bad thing.
 

Bronson Dugnutt

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MultiFormat Shooter said:
I didn't, and I will say that anytime we (the film photography community) lose a source of processing (or other support), anywhere in the world, it's a bad thing.
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Amen. Probably better off not producing effluent for the Great Lakes though. Luckily piping into the tar sands is always an alternative.
 

ic-racer

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I actually thought they had stopped processing film long ago. It has been over ten years since I bought their 8x10 enlarger.
 

MattKing

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Bronson Dugnutt said:
Amen. Probably better off not producing effluent for the Great Lakes though. Luckily piping into the tar sands is always an alternative.
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Any commercial lab in Canada will have been required to comply with environmental protection rules for many years.
 

mshchem

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Every photo shop around here extracted the silver from the effluent. The rest was then treated by municipal waste water facility. Even large labs produce very little waste. Washless technology, the Blix and Fixer is collected and desilvered . No biggie.

My friend Roger who closed up his place in 2018 sold several years worth of silver in 2011, the store got a check from the refiner for over 10 grand.
 

Mr Bill

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MattKing said:
Any commercial lab in Canada will have been required to comply with environmental protection rules for many years.
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Since roughly 35 years ago in Toronto, as I recall. The outfit where I worked operated a fair-sized lab (capable of around 100,000 8x10"" color prints per day) there for a lot of years. About that time they built a new lab; I actually designed the effluent control systems. As I recall they were about as stringent as anything in the US, with silver limits of something like 0.2 ppm. That's essentially the same thing as two-tenths of a milligram silver per liter, which in more understandable terms would be like trying to control the population of Toronto (GTA around 7 million people) to within 1 or 2 people. Now, this is stringent enough to be virtually unattainable by most "regular" people, and based on posts I've seen on this site I'd be very skeptical that anyone is "legitimately" meeting those limits. On hobbyist scales, as soon as you process only a few rolls of film the fixer will contain enough silver that simply moving the wet film into the wash water will put the wash water comfortably over the limit.

As I recall about a dozen years later they came back and greatly reduced the allowable iron levels, to the extent that using a steel wool recovery cartridge might put you over the iron limit (by this time I was no longer involved in effluent issues; people from my former QC department were dealing with it). (In an insulting vein, you gotta wonder how they dealt with runoff from rusty exhaust systems on cars driven in the rain.)
 
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Mr Bill

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I pretty much concur, with reasonable effluent limits. But when the silver limits are down to around 0.2 ppm the standard silver recovery methods fall way short. The metallic replacement cartridges are typically reliable only down to around 2 or 3 ppm, ten times higher. Back in that era Kodak developed a technology called TMT precipitation which could easily go below that, mainly as a follow-up "polishing" system after conventional silver recovery. Otherwise, well that's why "washless" systems were invented - to make it "affordable" to have a hazardous waste hauler carry everything off. Where, as best I can guess, they essentially "incinerate" your dirty water.
 

Andrew O'Neill

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What did the refiner check? The cheque? Sorry. Couldn't resist.
 

canuhead

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webpage says "...until further notice..." so guessing volume is not high enough to keep their d&d processor running optimally. There are quite a number of professionals who would be affected by this, so would hope this is temporary. There are other options in Toronto, but not for those who expose sheets.
 

pentaxuser

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There may be reasons in this company's case why it has stopped and if canuhead is right with his interpretation of the notice, then it may be temporary only but it may be a reminder for those who seem to think the film revival is akin to a new dawn that the reality for some of those who make their living with processing film may mean that the revival needs to be looked at more realistically in terms of its size

pentaxuser
 
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