e-6 chemicals disposal: too wrong to mix all of them?

[mariana_g.]

hello everyone

i've read a lot of past posts about chemical disposals, but i still have a question.

i have a small personal lab, for my own use at home.

right now i need to renew all my e-6 chemicals for the first time.

i had renewed both developers before at university, and over there they just

poured them down the drain, which is something i'm not really comfort with.

 

i know all these chemicals have different components, but i have some troubles

with space and i need the bottles to renew my chemicals and work, so i'm

thinking... is it awfully bad if i just pour them all in one huge bottle, or in

a couple?

i mean, if i mix them all, will be impossible to dispose them properly later?

will my house blow?

or am i crazy and i should just put up with having 7 bottles of waste (plus a

lot more of b&w old chemicals i haven't poured down the drain)?

 

i'm just in a lot of doubt cause i haven't found a place to dispose them safely

yet, so i can't ask "them" about this cause there's no "them" yet.

 

 

thanks in advance for your help.

 

mariana.

[john_shriver]

Kodak has plenty of information on how to dispose of these chemicals on their website.

 

Mixing them up is fine.

 

But, the responsible thing is to extract the silver from the fixer. Pour it in a 2 liter soda bottle with a good ball of steel wool in it. The silver will plate the iron, and in a few days pour the liquid down the drain. Silver is the only thing in there that's bad for the environment.

 

Also, you can probably regenerate the expensive bleach by aerating it with an aquarium pump and bubbler stone.

[g._armour_van_horn]

My processor allows me to recover the bleach separately, which I do because the stuff is expensive and I regenerate and replenish it. Right there you cut your chemical cost in half.

 

I don't know how much silver there is in a roll of E-6, but as my system doesn't allow me to recover the fix by itself I just ignore it. Everything except the bleach goes to the same waste carboy. I just drag the jug out and dump it on the ground when there's 4 gallons in it. Unless it's dark and rainy, in which case it goes in the sink.

 

I might worry about it if the volume was a hundred times what it is. If I ever get the volume up enough to use my Noritsu I'll do silver recovery, but I'll still dump the rest. A retired Kodak chemist who used to hang out here told me that the combination of the chemistries is a pretty mild fertilizer.

 

There's really nothing terribly toxic in there, most of the nasty stuff was eliminated in the switch from E-4 to E-6, the rest was hoiked about ten years ago as I recall. There used to be thousands of people working with this stuff in labs, so eliminating the work-place hazards was a major advantage.

 

I'll worry about it again if I hit 100 rolls a week.

 

Van

[keith_lubow]

The main thing to hold is the fixer. (Bleach too, if you want to replenish it; probably a good way to go if you process a lot. Problem is finding any information on such things nowadays. I would contact Kodak directly via phone.) For fixer, I have always done the same thing Kodak recommends for b/w fixer: Run it through steel wool, then dump it. They used to have steel wool filters with replaceable filters that you could install in line with your sink's drain, but I am not sure if they are made any more.

 

If you want the absolute best answers to your question, I would poke around on the Kodak Website, and also call them.

 

Keith

[craig_shearman1]

This question comes up periodically. IMHO, if your concern is the environmental impact, there is no problem with pouring photo chemicals down the drain in the quantities involved with processing at home. A gallon or so of darkroom chemicals diluted into the hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater in your city's sewage treatment system is no more significant than any of the household detergents and other waste that goes down the drain. If you were runnning a commercial lab that would be different. I know the environmentalists would say everyone doing this adds up. But there are only a relative handful of us still developing film at home today compared with 20 years ago, so I'm not sure that argument holds up any more. Motor oil and lawn fertilizers running down storm drains and directly into the water supply without treatment are certainly a bigger worry and might put photo chemicals into perspective. Saving up gallons and gallons of the stuff and then dumping it all at once is probably worse for the environment than dumping it as you go and thereby spreading it out. While there is normally no significant health threat from photo chemicals (with proper ventiliation and handling and not drinking the stuff) I would think the potential health threat from gallons and gallons -- just from ending up with a smelly, gunky mess in your house if nothing else -- begins to outweigh environmental concerns. As for silver recovery, it simply isn't cost effective unless you're running commercial volumes.

[d_smithers]

Many chemicals used in the home would need a recovery/cleanup routine and a permit if used on an industrial scale. If you were running a photolab, depending on your area, you would need a permit to use and dispose those chemicals. And there's a good reason too.

[g._armour_van_horn]

At commercial scale, all the chemistry gets dumped, but sometimes it is specifically buffered. (At least in the Seattle area, LA might be different.) The fix is run through silver recovery. But remember, the low-end of commercial equipment is the Noritsu 410, which runs 10 24-exposure rolls an hour, and most commercial labs ran E-6 six days a week. And those machines were generally installed in plants that were running several times as much C-41.

 

Now that E-6 is a tiny volume compared to ten years ago, it simply doesn't need to be worried about. Certainly not at the level of someone doing it by hand occasionally.

 

Van

[jerry2]

In the commercial setting for E6 waste, what does the city force you to do with waste? Save it? Or do they just monitor what you are doing? Seems like an honor system even for the big labs?