Silver Recovery from Photographic Wash Waters by Ion Exchange

David J. Degenkolb, Fred J. Scobey

The high price of silver makes it an economic necessity for processing laboratories to recover silver, and the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water Standards Act makes it essential to remove silver from the processing laboratory effluent. With good electrolytic silver recovery and efficient chemical techniques, most of the silver can be recovered; however, in spite of such recovery systems, about 9% of the silver removed from the film gets into the wash water. It is this 9% which must be, in part or totally, removed from the plant effluent in order to meet EPA requirements and the code of many municipalities. Various well-known methods of lowering the silver content of wash water are explored in this paper and important experimental work with ion exchange techniques is discussed.

Print ISSN
Published
1977-02
Content type
Original Research
DOI
10.5594/J13236