ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter may be a bit misleading. Film developing is never completely environmentally friendly, but you can minimize the risk to yourself and the environment significantly by processing your film with the recipes contained in this chapter. While all silver process films (color, black and white, reversal, negative) can be processed with the recipes in this chapter, the resulting image will be a black and white negative image, usually with a distinct brown cast to the film (although this can be removed). The processes this chapter discusses has been dubbed caffenol by the people who use it, most of whom are still photographers and comes (so far as I can assess) from a merging of the terms caffeic acid and phenol (more about these in a minute). There is a caffenol Facebook group, Flickr group, several websites and blogs, and even an online book, The Caffenol Bible, devoted to it. In the last decade or so a handful of intrepid filmmakers began to experiment with developing motion picture film with these homebrew processes. The results were amazing and seriously less toxic than using traditional developer.
