Originally posted by Not a Number I remember being able to buy silver recovery kits in the 80s.
They were a joke. They might have recovered 20% of the dissolved silver at best, and if the fixer was ammonium thiosulfate based rather than sodium thiosulfate based, they didn't work at all. They also introduced a different sort of pollution, and cost more than the cost of the saver They recovered, which was so impure that it had no commercial use, including refining it to pure silver.
Pretty much killing one patient to briefly extend the life of another one.
The only way to do any sort of efficient Silver recovery in the field is by cracking the silver out with large amounts of high amperage electricity.
Even at the present price of silver, I don't think a large commercial lab would have a viable side business doing silver recovery, and there ain't a snowballs chance in hell it would be viable for a small home darkroom user who will produce a few gallons of spent fixer per year.
We did silver recovery because the law told us to, not because we made a profit from it.
It was an expensive cost of business.
---------- Post added Jul 5th, 2021 at 09:19 AM ----------
Originally posted by Wasp Used fixer contains enough silver to make recycling viable. This was the case in the eighties before recycling was even a thing. Finding takers might be different in these digital days, though.
No it doesn't. It has never been profitable to recover silver from photography. When silver was a few dollars an ounce, it cost more in electricity to recover an ounce of silver.
It's viable the same way burning dollar bills is viable.