Dumping Fixer in NYC

Roger Hicks said:
If the EPA thinks silver is a toxic heavy metal, they are not very good scientists and they have not been reading the CDC's observations about it (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta): http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts146.html

The CDC is not noted for being insouciant or sloppy.

Cheers,

R.
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Roger,

You can probably sprinkle silver bits on your Corn Flakes in the morning and get away with it, but silver is highly toxic to acquatic organisms, from the bottom of the food chain on up. That's one reason many municipal sewer systems don't like having the stuff discharged into their pipes. When the local authorities here decided to clean up an area offshore of one of the most egregious sewer overflows into the bay, silver was one of the big drivers; it took discharges from a lot of the commercial E-6 and C-41 labs in the city.
 
rxmd said:
If you grind your silver coins really small and pour them down the drain, it's a problem.

Silver is used in water purification on a large scale world-wide, because it has anti-microbial properties. It's quite amazing how little silver you actually need for that. Whether you call that toxic or not is a matter of definition of what's toxic, but silver purification tablets are made on an industrial scale and successfully used by everybody from hikers to armies by the millions every year.

One of the places where you don't want anti-microbial stuff is the activated sludge in your local sewage plant. That's why pouring filter down the drain is a bad idea. Dumping a bit of steel wool or a teaspoon of sodium dithionite is no work at all. A liter of fixer doesn't amount to much, that is definitely correct. But well, no matter what Roger thinks about science, caring or not caring about things that don't amount to much is the main difference between considerate and inconsiderate individuals.

And it's not really an environmental thing, it's just good old engineering. Talk to the guy at your sewage plant if you want a guaranteed 100% non-liberal arts opinion on the subject.
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And ask him how much of a problem silver is at his sewage plant. Indeed, whether it amounts to anything, never mind 'much'. Ask him if he can even detect silver concentrations in sewage without a mass spectrograph. Or with, for that matter.

Cheers,

R.
 
As mentioned above, silver has anti-bacterial qualities (and is used in creams for burn patients) that could damage a private sewage system's ability to digest your waste. I don't know if it is significant. Certainly chlorine bleach is also bad for the little fellers?
 
aad said:
As mentioned above, silver has anti-bacterial qualities (and is used in creams for burn patients) that could damage a private sewage system's ability to digest your waste. I don't know if it is significant. Certainly chlorine bleach is also bad for the little fellers?
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Yes, I'd not put it in a septic tank. But worrying in the 21st century about silver waste from photographic processing in the New York sewer system is bad science.

Cheers,

R.
 
A couple of interesting points here: Yes, the silver will bind to steel wool, and in labs steel wool cartridges in 5-gallon buckets in a flow through system is actually used as a tailing device to grab any residual silver or as a primary reclamation medium.

The type of silver expelled (I'm not a chemist here) is supposed to be 'non-hazardous' to life.

I also have heard anecdotal reports that the silver if put down the drain bonds to the inside of cast iron pipes.

You can also call the local water department, since it eventually becomes their problem anyway, how they feel about it.

And since there always environmental consequences to anything we do, driving around (or however one travels) looking for a place to dispose of effluent costs in carbon emission, congestion (hey, it's NYC), wasted/spent time, etc. that must be factored in too.

Believe me, I don't think this is an inconsequential problem, but safety and common sense have to be factored in.

And I have received 2 awards for environmentally-friendly business practices so I do take this very seriously.

STEEL WOOL CARTRIDGE DISPOSAL: Since this is an approved method of capture, the cartridges (5-gallon plastic pails with some plumbing and the steel wool, now silver enriched) can be sent to refiners for proper disposal and reclamation, sometimes one even gets money back!

Pour in used fixer, bleach-fix, and the outlet pipe drains silver-less (!) rusty water to the drain/sewer. No developer, etc., no silver in that.
 
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Roger Hicks said:
And ask him how much of a problem silver is at his sewage plant. Indeed, whether it amounts to anything, never mind 'much'. Ask him if he can even detect silver concentrations in sewage without a mass spectrograph. Or with, for that matter.
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Interestingly enough, I've done exactly that (well, the first one, because the latter are mainly about being smug as far as I can see) over a beer once. The man basically said that in hobbyist concentrations of one liter a month or so it's not much of a problem, but that they would still like it better if I could do the absolutely trivial steel wool thing, because there's all sorts of people doing lots of things all the time because they think its so trivial that it doesn't matter, and in the end it does add up to quite a bit of contamination. In the end it's my fixer, and the pills of Grandma next door, and the oil from the car engine of the guy on the other side of the street who dumps it in the gutter, and so on. The analogy he used is that if he pisses in my garden it's not much of a problem, but if he does that, and the next guy sends in his dog to defecate there, and the guy after him throws his empty beer bottle over the fence, in the end I won't like the state of my garden anyway, despite all of those being absolutely trivial.

So if I now have the opinion of a phogography journalist somewhere in France, and the opinion of a sewage engineer over here, it's an easy choice whom to listen to 🙂
 
For years the Photo Department of Orange Coast College in Southern California had dumped their fixer down the drain. The department chair Rick Steadry in 1989 had said in a lecture " ..the pipes probably lined thick with silver by now.."
 
In India, some sweets have silver leaf on the top.

I rang the local council and they said not to worry and pour it [dev chems] down the drain. If there was another option, I would be happy storing it all up in big cans and taking it somewhere - but I'm sure I pour more cleaning products down the drain than fixer/dev each week.
 
rxmd said:
Interestingly enough, I've done exactly that (well, the first one, because the latter are mainly about being smug as far as I can see) over a beer once. The man basically said that in hobbyist concentrations of one liter a month or so it's not much of a problem, but that they would still like it better if I could do the absolutely trivial steel wool thing, because there's all sorts of people doing lots of things all the time because they think its so trivial that it doesn't matter, and in the end it does add up to quite a bit of contamination. In the end it's my fixer, and the pills of Grandma next door, and the oil from the car engine of the guy on the other side of the street who dumps it in the gutter, and so on. The analogy he used is that if he pisses in my garden it's not much of a problem, but if he does that, and the next guy sends in his dog to defecate there, and the guy after him throws his empty beer bottle over the fence, in the end I won't like the state of my garden anyway, despite all of those being absolutely trivial.

So if I now have the opinion of a phogography journalist somewhere in France, and the opinion of a sewage engineer over here, it's an easy choice whom to listen to 🙂
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No, not about being smug. About a discussion with a waste-water treatment specialist who dealt with concentrated waste water (reduced in volume to keep disposal costs down) from Ilford and found cadmium in it -- at levels he admitted could only be detected with a mass spectrograph (Ilford had developed some old Forte paper and some of the cadmium had leached out).

The 'p*ssing in the garden' analogy doesn't really work very well. First, a waste water treatment plant is designed for waste water treatment: it's not a garden. Second, the treatments required for Granny's pills, your fixer and the waste motor oil are completely different: to conflate them is a very poor argument. Third, as Roger Christian pointed out, other disposal methods bring their own costs too, and everything we do pollutes to some degree: the wood that heats my house (very eco-friendly!) is cut down and cut up with chain-saws. Fourth, as even your chum the water engineer admitted, it's trivial in hobbyist quantities. In fact I'd be willing to bet that silver levels at the sewage plant are undetectable, which is why I asked the question. If either of us is being smug, I think you're ahead.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
If either of us is being smug, I think you're ahead.
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Sorry if I come across like that, I don't mean to.

First, a waste water treatment plant is designed for waste water treatment: it's not a garden.
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Of course they're different; that's what makes it merely an analogy. 😉

Second, the treatments required for Granny's pills, your fixer and the waste motor oil are completely different: to conflate them is a very poor argument.
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Well, of course the treatment is different, but the attitude of dumping stuff because it's trivial is the same. I think the point of that argument was that if enough people are inconsiderate in what they dump down their respective drains, a lot of contamination ends up and where those drains end.

Third, as Roger Christian pointed out, other disposal methods bring their own costs too, and everything we do pollutes to some degree: the wood that heats my house (very eco-friendly!) is cut down and cut up with chain-saws.
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Of course it's true that everything incurs a cost, but that's very easily turned into a strawman argument by which you can justify any behaviour, which is why it's usually best to skip that kind of general statement and look at the concrete case. Here, dumping a wad of steel wool in your fixer has a fairly minimal cost. You can even reuse the same wad. 😉 Ecologically it's probably better to burn it than to dump it, if only because your waste burning plant's filter is better at filtering it out than the sludge in your sewage plant. As far as the overall recycling cost for your liter of fixer is concerned, we probably incur more overall costs by spending time in answering each other 😉)

I know an amateur photographer here who uses sodium thiocyanate to bind the silver, then has his local dental technician smelt it down into a ring for his girlfriend once or twice a year. I think he comes out with negative cost then. (He's an industrial chemist who is quite active on German phototechnology forums as well. Then again, as a chemist, he arguably has options at his disposal that others don't.)

Philipp
 
I read not to long ago that its not so much the silver, but the fixer itself that is a problem. It would neutralize the chlorine used to treat the water. IIRC the same chemical used in fixer is sold as a declorinator for fish tanks.
 
I was told last week by a german photographer moving to UK that their photoclub use to dispose of the fixer in recycling centres. Recovery of the silver is paid back to them, which pays for the treatment of the fixer itself. I have a figure in mind that a saturated fixer solution would have 5-7 gr/litre, does it sound odd to you gents?
 
Gents,
I did a quick assessment on silver & chemicals in fixer and for a usage of 1 film per week with the hypothesis of disposing the water into the drain. In the average case, i.e. 80% efficiency in chem's and water recycling, it represents an increase over the average of a european citizen (west) of approx 1% for acidification, aquatic ecotoxicity, human toxicity.
This figure would be different in the colonies (canada, us, australia, etc...) where the lifestyle is comparatively aggressive towards environment; human population density is lower in these areas which would mean a lower average human impact, but a presumably equal impact on ecosystems. I've based this quick assesst on european data and on current methods (and also I'm at work and I may not be supposed to be RFF'ing ;-)
 
aldobonnard said:
I was told last week by a german photographer moving to UK that their photoclub use to dispose of the fixer in recycling centres. Recovery of the silver is paid back to them, which pays for the treatment of the fixer itself. I have a figure in mind that a saturated fixer solution would have 5-7 gr/litre, does it sound odd to you gents?
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Actually the amount of silver needed to drive a fixer solution to saturation depends very much on the fixer. 5-7 grams is quite a lot, but not out of the ordinary e.g. for the first bath in two-bath fixing. I normally make new fixer when mine has 3 to 5 grams. It's difficult to give a general figure because of the different saturation levels of different fixer mixtures, which is why people use tests such as the sodium iodide test to find out whether their particular fixer has reached saturation. Likewise, the chemical effects of the fixer itself are wildly different, just like the composition of the fixing bath itself.

(By comparison, the makers of commercial silver-based water purification tablets reckon about 0.1 mg of silver per liter of purified water [data for Micropur by Katadyn, NATO code 6850121405438]. Using these figures, the silver from one liter of spent fixer at 5 g/l would be sufficient to purify about 50,000 liters of drinking water.)
 
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