Washing Film - Best Environmentally Friendly Way to Do It?

CBG said:

I'm not sure I'd trust Permawash's claimed numbers. They are so far off everyone else's results that I suspect they are unadulterated voodoo marketing hype.

OK ... Lets talk prints, since paper based prints are the real test of washing. The numbers might work if you have one single very low key very dark print with little silver to be removed, fixed in pristine absolutely fresh unused rapid fix just mixed in two baths used something like the Ilford method, absolutely fresh unused Permawash just mixed, all for only that first single print being treated, and a deluge of water blasting over the print in an utterly wasteful manner.

Maybe. Maybe for that first single print, if handled perfectly, just one print so all solutions are working at utmost performance. But I wouldn't trust the claims even for just one print. I can't see how any wash aid can so greatly outperform very similar competitors.

I am sure Permawash is a very good product. I have used it. I have some now and use it without worry. Just not for such short process times. I don't believe in magic or miracles.

Click to expand...

well, I've used it and have had prints sitting in 90 deg temp. for the summer in my garage for 5 years. along with film. most survived. Ansel Adams used it and gee I guess his prints have survived. Save water and time. Oh for you people who don't have to worry about a water bill like I do here in Florida just wash your film for a hour.

michael9793 said:

well, I've used it and have had prints sitting in 90 deg temp. for the summer in my garage for 5 years. along with film. most survived.

Click to expand...

There is the key word "MOST SURVIVED"!

ALL should have survived if things were done correctly.

PE

My argument is not whether Permawash is a good product. I'm sure enough that it is that I have used Permawash for my own film and paper. My argument is solely whether I trust their verbiage and instructions, for anything better than momentary print survival. I use a higher concentration, longer rinse, longer bathing in wash aid and longer wash times. I use the conservative times that Kodak suggests. I'd rather be safe than sorry.

I don't know how this discussion driftet to one product, I started reading the thread, and skipped to the end....

Being a chem. engineer, and having worked years in a laboratory I can offer some advice. In a standard Paterson tank for two films, one need no more than 4 - 5 liters of water.

There are two principles at work here, dilution and diffusion.

At first one simply dilutes the fluid, this works fast, just a few seconds, but later in the process what is needed is getting the fixer salt molecules out of the emulsion, that is diffusion and takes minutes.

One also needs to take into account the rest of the last bath that remains inside the tank, every time one drains.

Dilution works all the way during the process and is what needs to be taken into account, as soon as the molecules have diffused out from film and into solution.

All this is standard operating procedure in all classical analysis work in any laboratory.

The calculation is like this : Drain fixer 600ml , in the tank remains 30ml that adheres to the tank insides, spiral, film and so on. Dilution is 30/600 = 1/20 and remains constant for every change of water.

repeated changes works this way 1/20 * 1/20 *1/20 = 0.000125 in other words concentration is reduced to 0,0125% of the original fixer bath.

In 6 changes one is down to a concentration of 0,000 000 015 or 0,015 millionth of the start.

If the procedure is something like this :

Empty fixer, fill with water and shake for 5 seconds, drain.
Repeat, shake double the time every time until this is repeated 7 times

Time increases like this : 5 - 10 - 20 - 40 - 80 - 160 - 320 seconds, no need to shake all the time but diffusion takes more and more time during the porocedure.

Last cycle will require some 5 minutes stand time, shake at first and a few times during the 10 minutes.

Concentration will now be down to 0,000 000 000 781 or a billionth of the start concentration.

One has used just 4 liters of H2O, compared to about 120 liters for an hours rinse in running water, and as any chem. engineer will tell you, even after an hour of running water the concentration will NOT be lower than after 7 changes of water.

The whole thing will take about 12 minutes, one has to work a little, the film will be perfectly rinsed and easily last 50 years as has mine since 1962, I have used this procedure for ever, except for a few years when I got a Paterson "tube", I note that there are a couple of spots on a few of the films from those years (the lazy years...) before and after they are spotless.

BTW I learned this not in school but from a german in a book : Hans Windish "Die neue Foto-Schule I, die Technik" apparently water was scarce in western germany after WW2!! The book is still recommended if it can be found, I have my copy.

Closing I will just note that archival copies on paper can be treated after similar principles. Using a couple of baths, draining the previous water out and changing 8 to 10 times should get prints that will last forever.

A method that I have used for many, many years is to use a cylindrical plastic conainer large enough to hold several reels. In the bottom are drilled a few very small holes. I insert the reels and fill the container once and then pour out the water to remove any fixer trapped in the reels. Then I adjust the water flow so that the container remains filled with water and little spills over. Clean water enters at the top and water and fixer exits the bottom. The size and number of holes are adjusted so that once filled the container will drain in approximately 1 minute when no additional water is added. I leave the container under the tap for 20 minutes. Since the flow rate is quit small I feel this method conserves water while providing good washing. I have negatives that are 50 years old that show no problems from residual fixer. The diameter of the container should be small enough so that the reels do not move around but remain on top of each other.

Gerald this way, slow running water will give less effective wash than 5 changes of water and about 1000 times less effective than 7 changes. I'm not saying you get bad results, but you waste both time and water.....

Eric;

Please look at the math I have presented earlier in this and other threads, which was first shown by Mason in his text in the chapter on washing. The basis for it is dC/dT (Change in Concentration in the film or paper vs Time) and the only way to prove what is good is to test with a hypo retention kit and a silver retention kit. Mason and others do show that running water is better than standing water, and agitation is better than no agitation.

PE

Running water gives you a GRADIENT, it i much like recharging batteries, where the curve flattens with time, ie washing gets less and less effective.

Dumping everything and extending time slightly with each water saves time, saves WATER and is the only way such things are done among professional chemists, Mason and others nonwithstanding. In classic chemical analysis, with a rotating gizmo, 3 changes of water is generally held to be enough....

I used to do this for a living, in part of my professional life.

Erik Prestmo said:

I used to do this for a living, in part of my professional life.

Click to expand...

So did I!

Mason, P 204 gives the equation as:

dX/dT = K[(a - x) - w]

Where w = conc of hypo in the water adjacent to the emulsion, K = a constant based on conditions under test (thickness, hypo type, silver concentration, swell, etc), a= the initial concentration of the hypo, and x is the loss after time t.

This equation is most efficient with running water as you reach the minimum desired level of hypo. With changes of water you get concrete downward steps that approach this value, but in a less efficient manner.

If done correctly, they can both work, but usually the method of changing water is misused and Mason, who originally advocated this method, changed his opinion in later years (and in this text) to that of recommending running water with agitation.

Of course, re-presenting this argument here opens a years old debate on APUG here and on Photo Net on this subject.

I suggest you use what works for you but test for residual hypo and silver to insure proper lab procedure.

At the same time, there are other ways to improved hypo and silver removal if one is interested, but none of them are perfect either as they use additional chemicals to promote silver and hypo removal by a variety of methods.

There is no significant problem with the slight amount of hypo produced and the slight amount of silver produced in any method of wash. In fact, the multiple wash method produces, on average, exactly the same amount of hypo and silver in the waste water as any other method.

So the consumption of water may differ, but the effluent is "contaminated" by the same amount in both cases. Your film is probably better off using the continuous wash method however.

At present, I am working on ways to reduce the amount of wash needed for any film or paper. I find that the cost is quite considerable to the consumer but depending on water resources, some may be willing to pay that price.

PE

Mason's work (at Ilford) complimented G.I.P. Levenson's (at Kodak, Harrow) and it's no co-incidence that Levenson was the editor working with Mason on his book.

The years old extremely heated debate on Photo.net etc was based on incorrect assumptions, Levenson's work at Kodak was on washing after Sodium Thiosulphate based fixers often with a hardener, while the later Ilford wash technique is based on Ammonium Thiosulpahte based fixers (Hypam) with no hardener. A fact conveniently over looked by both sides until Roger Hicks pointed it out.

Ian

And, even later work was done using the new film and paper hardeners which restrain swell to a different amount. And much work was done with alkaline fixers with and without hardeners.

Yes, yes, I know all of that, but the salient point remains that any method puts the same amount of chemistry (within tiny limits) into the wash water if the wash is properly done! Therefore, both methods impact on the environment in roughly the same manner. Wash aids can increase this "pollution" to some extent, or at least change it.

PE

Photo Engineer said:

And, even later work was done using the new film and paper hardeners which restrain swell to a different amount. And much work was done with alkaline fixers with and without hardeners.

Yes, yes, I know all of that, but the salient point remains that any method puts the same amount of chemistry (within tiny limits) into the wash water if the wash is properly done! Therefore, both methods impact on the environment in roughly the same manner. Wash aids can increase this "pollution" to some extent, or at least change it.

PE

Click to expand...

The amount of chemicals both methods put into the environment may be the same.
The amount of water that has to be cleaned (either before it is dumped into a river, or before it goes into the water grid, or both) however is not.

Q.G. said:

The amount of chemicals both methods put into the environment may be the same.
The amount of water that has to be cleaned (either before it is dumped into a river, or before it goes into the water grid, or both) however is not.

Click to expand...

And again, that depends.

We can all agree that our film and paper must have a certain minimum of hypo and silver in them for good keeping. The rate at which it is removed depends on the chemistry, the photomaterial and the local water used.

The discreet stepwise wash method decreases this retained level in a series of sawtooth steps down towards the minimum and the last wash is in equillibrium with the photomaterial in terms of retained materials.

With the continuous wash, the function is a linear decrease in retained materials and can reach near zero at the end due to the fact that fresh, uncontaminated water can be put in contact with the photomaterial at the very end.

Either of these methods can work as long as you test for retained silver and hypo in your photomaterial.

But, as for the question of concentration of materials / unit volume of effluent, you are right but studies on this are ambiguous. In fact, the first dump of wash water has a high concentration of hypo and silver salts whereas the first wave of running water has a lower concentration of hypo and silver salts.

I'm adding an afterthought here.....

The several washes method seems to behave in a manner similar to Plug Flow, so I suggest reading up on this. You get waves of decreasing concentration of contaminants. In a steady wash, there is a gradual decrease in contaminants. There is some argument that an instantaneous jump in contaminants, at a certain level, can be more harmful than a more dilute and spread out introduction of contaminants. But, as I note below, this is ambiguous depending on study.

Therefore, at any given time, with any given liter of wash water, it should be tested for contaminants to see which is better or which is worse. Due to the rapid dilution in most sewer systems results that I have heard of have been ambiguous either way.

The only conclusion is that the amount of chemicals dumped is equivalent.

PE

When you use more water, more water needs to be treated.
And it will be, regardless of the concentration of chemicals in it.

See my edit of my previous post.

It is not merely the amount of water, but the concentration of ingredients at any given moment which enters the sewage system or the treatment plant.

PE

No, no.
Even when you dump clean water down the sewer, it has to be treated. First, to make it clean water fit to come out of your tap. Then to clean it up again before it is dumped.
When you dilute the filth in the sewage system, it may lead to cleaner, i.e. less concentrated, sewage, but still and also increase the volume of it, increase the volume that has to be treated.

So another conclusion we can safely draw is that the more water you use, the more water will be treated.
At a price. Which counts as environmental costs.

Well, I have been involved in some of these situations with photofinishers being shut down due to effluent, and also doing lab tests on the effluents and how to constrain them.

Yes, the volume of sewage is important, but the absolute concentration of ingredients is also important. As an extreme at one end, the sludge becomes so thick it is virtually impossible to treat. On the other end, the volume is so great that the holding tanks can overflow. Both are bad.

But, you miss the point that a huge "plug" of concentrated chemistry can do more damage as it enters the treatment area than a larger more dilute flow. The word here "CAN" is important, because actual tests around the median, not extremes is ambiguous. And, I hasten to add that most of us dump very little due to the size of our operations.

Now, for a specific example of something extreme but possible. A photographer wishes to dispose of his effluent and he lives in a desert area. If he decides to dump it in the desert, should he dump concentrated waste over a small area, or dilute waste over a large area? This hypothetical question has real import on the situation we are considering here. The interesting part is that the concentrated effluent has insufficient volume to be dumped over a large area, but the dilute effluent can be dumped over a large area. The same holds true in a wash. Successive dumps occur with plug flow in the pipes and enter the sewage treatment as blocks of contaminant, but the more dilute continuous wash takes place over longer times.

In practice, as I said, the results are ambiguous due to the low flow from our types of labs.

On another tack, when water is severely limited, then a whole new set of practices hold. In a true desert environment, water is precious for both incoming purposes and outgoing purposes. There are few studies on the exact nature of what should be done in these cases. There are ways to adapt to this using mixed bed resins in which the total water consumed and total effluent remains zero once the system is set up and charged with water. You put in your initial charge of water for all of the processing system and then just drain off the deionized water at the other end and re-use it. The problem is the cost of the resins and the cost of disposal. This was all worked out by myself and others at EK in the 70s BTW.

PE

Interesting question.

I'd choose dumping concentrated waste on a small area over dumping diluted waste over a large area.
Except when the dilution is so great that we're entering the domain of homeopathic 'concentrations'.
Yet, then still the idea of dumping over a huge are instead of keeping the smut contained in a small one appears to be wrong, the worst of the two choices.

But what concentrations are we talking about here?
When we use a few litres of water to wash our film, instead of many times that much, do we create a "huge plug of concentrated chemistry"?
Does having to treat those few litres contaminated with fix cause problems that having to clean many times that much of more dilute fix doesn't?

For me, the botom line is that, even though we may not think it, water is not 'free'. We all live in a 'desert', even when we don't.
It is taken from the environment in huge quantities, at a cost to that environment. And it needs to be treated before it is fit for use. And once again after we have flushed it down the drain.
The more we waste it, the larger the cost, both to the environment (and our health) and to our wallets.

QG, you are right, but then as few as we analog photographers are, we contribute very little to the impact on the environment. Even a photofinisher contributes little in terms of water usage when you get right down to it.

Many industries use far more water than the entire analog manufacturing and processing chain are concerned, or they introduce far worse pollutants. Photography is quite mature and the engineers working in the field have considered the questions I bring up. In fact, I think that consideration of some of these facts and questions have given rise to the ambiguity and sometimes to the apparent retractions in textbooks.

The bottom line is to use what gives you the right level of retained hypo and silver at the lowest level of pollution.

And remember, when you dump exhausted developer and/or fixer, this is hundreds of times worse than the wash water contamination.

PE

QG:

You REALLY should be more concerned with the LOSERS at BP for destroying the worlds oceans and not so much with the water used by rinsing film or prints.

We in the USA pay a MAJOR amount for Water and Sewer processing and the amount of stuff that goes in the sewer is NOTHING compared to what goes down the drain just in household cleaners and washing cloths etc, So we PAY for this use and what we are depositing is a drop in the bucket.

And if you are REALLY freaked out, go buy some carbon offset credits (Dead Link Removed) to off set your hazardous waste activity !!

Now you will be SUPER GREEN !!!

Thanks

Scott

Scott_Sheppard said:

QG:

You REALLY should be more concerned with the LOSERS at BP for destroying the worlds oceans and not so much with the water used by rinsing film or prints.

We in the USA pay a MAJOR amount for Water and Sewer processing and the amount of stuff that goes in the sewer is NOTHING compared to what goes down the drain just in household cleaners and washing cloths etc, So we PAY for this use and what we are depositing is a drop in the bucket.

And if you are REALLY freaked out, go buy some carbon offset credits (Dead Link Removed) to off set your hazardous waste activity !!

Now you will be SUPER GREEN !!!

Thanks

Scott

Click to expand...

Will that work with my Septic?

You're quite right, Scott.

Running water will for most praktical purposes use more than 10 times the CLEAN water one uses by changing water X times in the tank. Since about 7 changes plus a little time is all that is really nevessary (se previous post with a simple calculus), its easy to see that changing water merely uses a gallon or a little more than that, while running water quickly uses 10 gallons or considerably more.

Since we're rinsing out chemicals, everyone must understand that the pollution argument is non-valid, both methods aims to put the same chemicals in the water. One method dumps them quickly, the other slowly, but that is inconcequental, this amount of now unclean water very quickly dissipates and mixes with enormous amount of unclean seewage.

In large parts of the world clean water is more valuable than oil...... so use it sparingly!

Erik

fotch said:

Will that work with my Septic?

Click to expand...

Probably, depending on what shit you put in there in the first place!!

Scott_Sheppard said:

QG:

You REALLY should be more concerned with the LOSERS at BP for destroying the worlds oceans and not so much with the water used by rinsing film or prints.

We in the USA pay a MAJOR amount for Water and Sewer processing and the amount of stuff that goes in the sewer is NOTHING compared to what goes down the drain just in household cleaners and washing cloths etc, So we PAY for this use and what we are depositing is a drop in the bucket.

And if you are REALLY freaked out, go buy some carbon offset credits (Dead Link Removed) to off set your hazardous waste activity !!

Now you will be SUPER GREEN !!!

Thanks

Scott

Click to expand...

You remind me of Margaret Thatcher, who when asked about the radiation escaping the nuclear nonsense in the U.K. said that the radiation level was low, below the background radiation level.
As if only the biggest amount counts and things don't all add up.

Sure, the Gulf spill is terrible.
But how is that a reason not to worry about all the other ways we polute the waters?

And are you saying that as soon as you PAY for something, it goes away?
As in: if BP PAYS everyone who wants to be payed a huge amount of money, then the Gulf isn't polluted anymore (or it still is, but it's not a big deal anymore)?

QG...

Q.G. said:

You remind me of Margaret Thatcher, who when asked about the radiation escaping the nuclear nonsense in the U.K. said that the radiation level was low, below the background radiation level. As if only the biggest amount counts and things don't all add up.

Click to expand...

Well at least she had a set of "BALLS" and did a much better job then the current WEAK A-HOLES !!

Q.G. said:

Sure, the Gulf spill is terrible. But how is that a reason not to worry about all the other ways we polute the waters?

Click to expand...

There is NOTHING to worry about, Processing FILM & Photographic PAPER is 100% LEGAL in the USA... The waste water treatment plants in the USA are designed to handle this and much much more. Do you really think that KODAK and others would still be selling items that would not be able to be used in the USA.... NO !! It is not like I am pouring this crap out on the lawn in the back yard. Everything we pour down the drain goes to wast treatment plants.

What about Lawn Fertilizers ? Soap ? Every other chemicals sold in the stores ??

What we are doing is within the legal rights as a US Citizen.

Q.G. said:

And are you saying that as soon as you PAY for something, it goes away? As in: if BP PAYS everyone who wants to be payed a huge amount of money, then the Gulf isn't polluted anymore (or it still is, but it's not a big deal anymore)?

Click to expand...

As to "BP" they are not even paying for what they have done. The board of Directors and the CEO of BP should be terminated (euthanized) for their mass disregard for the heath of the worlds oceans and the creatures that live in or around them. "FU*K BP and your buddy's from ROYAL DUTCH SHELL as well"

As to "YOU"... You should REALLY go DIGITAL and then you can sleep good at night knowing that you are not polluting the world water supply...

BUT WAIT... I bet the WASTE and the by-product from producing digital sensors and the required hardware to "GO DIGITAL" is much worse that WASHING FILM & PAPER.

So QG... You just need to relax and stop attacking people on APUG over this issue. There is nothing you can do about this topic. GET OVER IT !!

GO BUY SOME CARBON OFFSET CREDITS !!!

Thanks

Scott (Proud to be a "AMERICAN FILM & PAPER WASHER")