A Word to my Fellow Planet Killers

I love my fellow film photographers, I really do. We are, all of us, comrades. I had plans of getting into some of the more nitty-gritty practical stuff with this post but the winds of my inner musings have blown us off course a bit. (ADD can be a fickle mistress.) And so it is with heavy heart that I feel compelled instead to call a good lot of ya to task over something. Hopefully this doesn't include you personally dear reader, but if so, well, call it tough love.

While I hope I never come across to anyone as a film fan-boy I do strive to be a good ambassador for this most excellent medium. If you're here reading this you may even feel the same way. At the very least I assume you have some interest in shooting with film and therefore there should be no need for me to explain how it's in all of our best interest to keep film photography as viable as possible or the benefits of being part of a vital and vibrant a community of fellow traditional photographers. So of course the last thing you would ever do is outright disparage the practice, especially by contributing to the spread of misconceptions, half truths and straight out falsehoods.

Now imagine yourself at the local establishment enjoying a nice vessel of whatever's your pleasure when a conversation between two photographers you couldn't help but overhear turns to the subject of shooting film. “All those chemicals though,” one of them says, “they have to be bad for the environment.”

“Of course,” the other responds, “photo chemicals are poisoning our waterways and drinking water. They're just awful for the environment. They contain highly toxic heavy metals you know, so even small amounts have severe effects.”

Would you imagine the latter speaker is:

a) a passionate digital photographer who is baffled by the fact that anyone at all would still bother with film given it's obvious inferiority in every category not to mention the toxic waste it generates.

or

b) a passionate film photographer, eager to interact with others who share their love for the medium, especially when it comes to sharing their knowledge with newcomers.

The correct answer is 'b'. Though the second photographer is of course fictitious, their statement is an assemblage of various statements I pulled from posts in various online forums devoted to film photography in threads discussing the disposal of waste home darkroom chemistry. The point is if the a statement like this had been made by someone who was anti-film they could justifiably be called distorted, dishonest and flat out slanderous. So why do people who care enough about film photography to visit and participate in forums devoted to it so regularly slam it in ways that would be unconscionable for a film detractor?

In my early adulthood my job, part of which involved dealing with the chemistry for a 1 hour photo lab, brought me into contact with representatives of environmental agencies concerned with the handling of waste chemicals. The message I got from them was that in general waste photo chemicals were considered no more hazardous when poured down the drain than the dirty mop water from a janitor who does the same. This was the actual analogy they used. The one concern they did have was the fixer (actually bleach/fix as this was of course a colour process), not because it was particularly nasty in it's own right but because once used it contained the dissolved silver washed out of the film that had been run through it. It was easily removed however, and we were happy to do it because, hey, free silver.

At no point in all the years since did waste photo chemistry become any more of a hazard than it was back then (arguably less in fact) and at no point since did anyone discover that it represented a danger that was then unknown. But while waste photo chemicals weren't really on anyone's radar screen back then, somehow an ill founded notion that they represent some special and significant hazard has taken hold in the years since so that now I find it's something even photographers have started buying into. Most baffling of all from my point of view is that it seems to be film photographers in particular who are trumpeting these misconceptions most loudly.

What's behind all this. Here's a few highly speculative contributing factors that have no particular validity beyond the fact that I thought of them and therefore feel somewhat attached to:

• The internet. There was no internet back then, or at least hardly an internet. Now it has become a breeding ground of rumours and myths unchecked by the need to back anything up with references or facts. You should stop reading the internet. Well, wait a few minutes then stop.
• When digital was new and the big push was on to get everyone to update to the new way of doing things one of the angles taken was to float the idea that digital was the environmentally friendly choice. The idea that film is a dirty technology and digital was sparkly clean persists to this day even though waste photo chemistry isn't and never was ever considered a significant hazard, but today electronic waste is. Nuff said.
• Over the years the word “chemical” has become a sort of short hand, tacitly understood to mean “nasty bad stuff”. If somebody talks about chemicals in our food for example that's never a good thing. In photography our developers, fixers etc have always been referred to collectively as “photo chemicals” so the inference that has grown up around the word just came along for the ride. We have other terms for our laundry chemicals, medicinal chemicals, baking chemicals, germ-killing chemicals, power storage chemicals. These things are no less chemicals than are photo chemicals. We just don't call them that. I wonder how we'd feel about them if we did.

I  like to have a bit of fun when I label bottles of darkroom chemistry.
 This is my jug of Dihydrogen Monoxide. If it's not familiar as an ingredient
used in photo chemistry that's probably because most published formulas
\refer to it by its more common name, distilled water.

All of this has gotten my goat a bit (removes “Captain Obvious” hat), and I've spent a more time than is reasonable in aforementioned forums crafting exhaustive challenges to the received knowledge that Mother Earth dies a little each time we develop a roll of film. The few responses I've received have amounted to something like we should always act with the utmost caution with any chemical, there can always be unforeseen hazards, better safe than sorry and so on. Great, except there's no reason to single out photo chemistry for this treatment. Virtually everything we do involves chemicals, so until you're ready to treat your dirty dish water like hazardous waste let's look at some more realistic approaches.

If you stick to reasonably standard photo chemicals then the silver dissolved in your spent fixer presents a bigger potential environmental hazard several times over than all other chemistry concerns combined. Removing it is as simple as placing it in a container with either a crumpled up piece of aluminium foil or steel wool. Dissolved silver will replace the atoms in the metalic wad of your choosing and collect as a sludge in the bottom of the container. After a few days simply pour off the liquid, retaining the sludge. Most of the silver that remain will combine with sulfates in the fixer to form inert compounds that aren't harmful to anything.

That leaves developer and stop bath. So far as pH levels go the alkalinity of developer and the acidity of fixer more or less cancel. It won't really matter to the environment if you dump them separately but combining them first may be easier on your plumbing. I should note that all of this applies equally to film and print chemistry. If you do colour developing bleach and fix are normally combined (blix). Treat this just like black and white fixer.

Lastly, don't confuse environmental hazards with health and safety concerns. Fixer and stop bath can have strong odours that without adequate ventilation can easily become overwhelming in the confined environs of a darkroom, but the strong smell of stop bath comes from acetic acid, the stuff that makes vinegar vinegar, and vinegar is the widely touted environmentally friendly replacement for so many other chemicals. The characteristic smell of fixer meanwhile comes from the sulphur compounds that , the same ones that help neutralise some of the silver and which, I'm told, are good for the garden if you use the de-silvered as plant food (I'm no gardener, believe that at your own risk). Metol, a common ingredient in many developers, should be treated with some caution because some people have, or acquire with repeated exposure, a skin reaction when they come into contact with it. Released into the environment however it's one of the most benign chemicals used in the darkroom.

One final thought, it's one thing to err on the side of caution, it's quite another to allow excessive caution to become a substitute for being informed. Safety first is just a hollow phrase if you lack the understanding to know what safe looks like.