Roubineau, Pascal (Pascal.Roubineau@ci.sj.ca.us)
Tue, 21 Jan 1997 17:42 -0800 (PST)

I've noted several posts about handling silver bearing wastes & wastewater and I have some comments as an industrial waste inspector that may (or may not) be useful:

The EPA considers wastewater from film developing to be a Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing process water just like the water from plating, etching, etc. is. This means that you don't have to meet the federal silver limit until the wastewater is mixed together & being discharged, the significance of the legal *dilution* with non-silver bearing wastewater obviously depending on the volume of your other rinses. Obviously if your film/artwork site is in a separate facility or you drain wastewater from there separately from your plating area this doesn't apply.

I'm not putting down waste minimization, far from it. There are many cost & regulatory benefits to waste minimization in addition to my narrow focus of pollutants to the sewer. I put in my two cents worth since previous posts seemed unclear on where federal silver limits would be applied, which may affect the business decision of what to spend on silver treatment.

Pascal Roubineau
(The opinions stated here are mine and not necessarily the same as my employer)

The environmentally unsafe problems of silver reclamation, as well as the humanly unsafe problems associated with ammonia, have been eliminated from the photo plotting process with the Dry Process Direct write systems. The Graphics Art industry has been using the Lino-Type Hell (Heidelberg) Dry Setter photo plotter and Polaroid Dry Imagesetter film for several years now with great success, performance wise as well as environmentally and ecomocally.

I hesitate to use this forum for marketing purposes, however, not being the first to do so, I should point out that AOI International is now installing several Polaroid/Heidelberg systems in PCB shops after an extensive testing and evaluation period.

Dick Desrosiers
ddesros@ix.netcom.com
dick@aoi.ultranet.com
DD1423@aol.com
508-937-5400 ext 212
508-441-0122 (fax)