As it is in our own interest, and because of our commitment to maximum safety of product and supply, we take our information obligations very seriously. We follow the European legislation and do not work with blacklisted materials/components.
Below is a technical explanation of the chemicals that are used by us to produce photographic paper and by photo labs to create photos.
To summarize, some chemicals are required to produce the photo paper product. However, they will not be found (or in a minimal amount) within the photographic print after developing. An important note is that ensuring good recycling of both silver and chemistry is required from the photo labs.
Silver halide salt such as silver chloride, silver bromide and silver iodide crystals are the most important components of light sensitive photo paper. Those salts are the receivers of the energy during exposure towards light. In addition, they are the (temporary) storage location of the energy between exposure and development. This storage location is known as a latent image and is metallic silver. During the development, there is a chemical reaction between the latent image and the developer agent, which enhanced the latent image so the complete silver halide crystal will become metallic silver. At the same time, the reaction product of the developer agent will react with the pre-colour agent towards a colour. This pre-colour agent and the colour itself are only soluble in oil phase and will not dissolve in water.
The metallic silver and the non-exposed silver crystals will be dissolved in 2nd process step – bleach fixing. After the bleach fixing and washing step, there is a limited amount of silver present on the paper. The amount on paper is less than 5 mg/m2.
The bleach-fixing bath has a big load of silver. Depending on the paper type and the replenishment rate this can be 3 ~7 g/l. Not only for the environment, but also for economy, this is worth to recover.
In order to have a good efficiency of the conversion from light (exposure) towards energy storage in the crystals, there are limited amounts of dopants metals in the crystals, such as gold and rhodium. Those are also removed during the bleach fixing process and are not present in the printed image.
The pre-colour agents and the colour itself are only soluble in oil phase and cannot be removed during the washing step. This is also the main reason why images printed on true photographic papers are water-resistant in contrast with ink printing systems.