NewsBy FilmFocus
A Ring Made From the Silver in 600 Rolls of Film: A Spanish Film Lab's Recycling Project
This is an AI translation of an article originally published in Japanese. If anything reads oddly, the Japanese original is the authoritative version.
Silver is one of the raw materials used to make photographic film. It has long been known that when film is developed, unused silver particles are left behind in the spent developing solution. This winter, CARMENCITA, a film developing lab in Spain, began recovering silver from this waste solution and selling it in the form of jewelry.
Image source: carmencitafilmlab.com
Silver nitrate (AgNO3), used in photographic film, has the property of producing silver halide in response to light. Around 200 years have passed since this technology was established, yet silver remains at the heart of the photographic process to this day.
According to CARMENCITA, the Spanish film developing lab behind the project, it has succeeded in recovering silver from used chemicals and refining it to obtain silver with a purity of 99.9%. About 0.0176 grams of silver can be recovered from a single roll of C-41 film, which works out to roughly 600 rolls of film needed to make one ring.
The recovered silver is turned into rings by AGNO, a jewelry brand based in Barcelona, the same city where CARMENCITA is located. This first lot is limited to just 20 pieces. Each ring has its own size and character, and the plan is to release each batch as a separate series.
The process of making the rings is shown on CARMENCITA's website.