Photo Lab: Inside a Steel Wool Silver Recovery Canister

» Posted on September 28 2022 in Photoshop

At our photo lab we still use light sensitive photo paper that contains a small amount of silver. This silver comes off during the bleach fix step and has to be recovered from the waste chemicals. One way of recovering the silver is to use a metalic replacement technique where the effluent trickles thru a bucket of steel wool. There is a chemical reaction and the silver will bind to the steel wool and can then be refined.