It's unsurprising as film, especially the higher end film, uses quite a lot of sophisticated and hazardous chemicals that are getting much more expensive every year to produce.
> It's unsurprising as film, especially the higher end film, uses quite a lot of… hazardous chemicals that are getting much more expensive every year to produce
This was a very negative take (no pun intended). What citations do you have for the “hazardous” nature of film production? Rather than the popularity of film causing the availability problems?
Having done darkroom development for work, I can testify that film developing is toxic and creates significant amounts of hazardous waste that can't just go down the drain (anymore).
Whether or not that's a factor here is hard to say, but the decline in film use can only lead to lesser availability and higher prices for the chemicals it requires. Improved standards for waste management also make it more difficult and expensive to deal with the waste stream than it was 30 years ago.
That simply isn’t true. With B&W the only aspect of film development that poses environmental worries is the silver suspended in exhausted fixer. You’d have to be doing much more exotic work to require more precautions. Things like Selenium toning, perchlorate (ugh, nasty stuff) activators, potassium ferricyanide, etc. need more care but the processes that use those things are really rare these days. Developer compounds break down rapidly and stop bath is just a mild acidic solution, usually the equivalent of vinegar. With the exception of the fixer, home darkroom work is of no environmental consequence. Kodak, Fuji, and Agfa had gotten chemical safety figured out by the 90s. The last thing I remember being a problem was the stabilizers made from formulin (related to formaldehyde) but that was stopped in the late 90s. Think VPS was the last film that required it for the best archival performance.
Large quantities of developer/stop/bleach were also able to be disposed of once the ph had been neutralized. The only disposal service I remember with the labs I worked in was the silver recovery for the fixer.
As far as manufacturing films and papers goes I’m less certain. I do know that Kodak had been trimming some materials from their catalog that used dangerous materials through the 90s. They discontinued a warm tone paper that was loved by many in the early 2000s. It used cadmium as part of the emulsion chemistry. And while it didn’t pose any risk to people using the paper, manufacturing it certainly did. I’m sure that the big three film manufacturers had managed to minimize the use of dangerous materials as awareness and regulations spread. Can’t be as sure about the eastern European manufacturers though.
With "modern" commercial B&W developers, this is all true.
However, pyro (in various forms) is still available, still used by some photographers who prefer the results they get with it, and still quite toxic. You do have to go out of your way to find it, though.
I loved my pyro developers! Loved both PMK and the really old school versions as well. And yes, those are nasty but as you say they are really rare. I also think the raw materials are much more dangerous than working solutions. PMK was heavily diluted to make a working solution.
Pyro does give some very sharp results! Although these days, HC-110 does everything I need and it lasts forever on the shelf, so my pyro days are past me.
I worked in minilabs back in their last days. We were careful about what could go down the drain and what couldn't, but interestingly I don't think we paid anything to deal with the waste chemicals. They had to go through a recovery process that could then get dumped down the drain, but the waste actually contained silver (famously intertwined with film chemistry through history), and I think those recovery filters may actually have been provided to the company for free because the revenue came from re-cycling the silver.
Yup. Once the silver was removed from the blix and things were ph neutral they could be sent down the drain. Safe chemical disposal was (eventually) one of the prime criteria used for formulating photo chemicals.
I never touched black and white professionally except C-41 chromogenic (color film that only renders black and white). I don't have any deep understanding of the chemistry, but what I've been told is that all film contains silver, but in color film all the silver compounds are removed and replaced with dyes or pigments (I don't know the tech here) in their development process. Developing accurate and stable color was the holy grail of film photography and was mostly accomplished by the 90's.
My understanding is that the silver chemistry is left in black and white negatives and positives and is extremely stable, which is why photographs from the beginning era of photography can be viewed like the day they were developed provided the substrate was stable and maintained well. For instance, Harvard's observatory has an archive of glass negatives that go back to the 19th century and can still be useful for historical data.
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation! I wasn't aware of it, I've only hobbied with B/W back in the day because it's so much easier (much less complex chemicals, being able to use red light in the dark room during printing)
Nope. All photographic film and paper processing result in silver ending up in the fixer. B&W films have a much greater concentration of silver than color films do but labs tended to develop so much film and paper that it added up.
Film is "coming back" a little bit, much like vinyl records. I am hoping that this helps keep prices from going up, because film photography has already become quite an expensive hobby. Film alone is expensive now ($15 for 36 exposures for 35mm, for the good stuff), even if you develop and scan your own negatives.
I didn't get the impression that it was said as a negative critique of film, but if you want citations in that direction it's easy. Just look up all the crap the Kodak plant has been found to dump into the water/environment around Rochester. Lots of dioxins, carcinogens, etc. Tons of methylene chloride just to name one example. It's a giant chemical production plant, what do you really expect? GMO kelp and rainbow farts?
