One Gram of Silver
Silver hit a record and film got more expensive, just like in 1980. But a roll holds about a gram of silver, and the bigger risk to film may be the old machines that coat it.
FactUnion VerifiedEvery fact on the episode's fact sheet was checked against its sources. Wrong facts were corrected. What this meansFacts checked 13 Oct 2026
Chapters (10)
About this episode
In January 2026 silver passed a hundred and twenty dollars an ounce. A few weeks later Kodak Alaris raised film prices by up to thirty-nine percent and named silver as a reason. It sounded like 1980, when the Hunt brothers tried to corner silver and the New York Times reported that photo prices were rising with it. Then Ilford's maker, Harman, raised its US prices too, and said the cause was tariffs, not silver. Wren and Theo try to work out which story is true.
Along the way: how photography once bought about a quarter of the world's silver, why every colour photo you own was made with silver and kept none of it, the recycling business that hospitals and minilabs ran out of sight, and how Kodak got through the 1980 squeeze. Then the arithmetic, which points away from the metal and toward a few old coating lines and a fragile chemical supply chain that the film revival depends on.
Hosted by Wren and Theo, performed by synthetic voices. Supported by ShotBreak.
Facts and sources
Every fact used in this episode, with the sources it was checked against. Download as data
194 of 194 recorded lines matched the checked script.
Silver prices more than doubled in 2025 and reached a record high above $120 per ounce in January 2026.
Commentary at the time was divided: some analyses tied the 2025 to 2026 silver surge to industrial demand from solar panels, electric vehicles and AI infrastructure rather than market manipulation like the 1980 Hunt brothers corner, while PetaPixel said the rise appeared driven primarily by speculation tied to solar panels, and an IG analyst called it a generational bubble.
Kodak Alaris raised film prices on February 1, 2026, by between 1% and 39% depending on the stock, citing significant increases in the cost of silver and other components.
Kodak Alaris did not give a breakdown of how much of its 2026 price increase was due to silver versus other costs.
Harman/Ilford raised its 2026 US prices by 11% for film and paper and 12% for liquid chemicals, attributing the increases to newly imposed tariffs on goods imported from the United Kingdom.
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A Pellica blog post on Ilford’s 2026 US price increases stated that the cause was tariffs, not rising silver prices or factory constraints.
According to the Silver Institute, photographic demand for silver peaked in 1999 at 229 million ounces.
In 1999 photography’s 229 million ounces was roughly a quarter (about 26%) of total world silver demand of about 877.5 million ounces.
By 2025, photographic silver demand had fallen to 24.2 million ounces, according to the Silver Institute’s World Silver Survey 2026.
Photovoltaic (solar) demand for silver reached 194 million ounces in 2023, having grown from trivial levels in the early 2000s.
Industry estimates typically put the silver in a 36-exposure roll of 35mm film at around 1 gram, though some sources give 0.2 to 0.5 grams depending on film type and speed.
The raw silver in a roll of film costs roughly $0.90 at $29 per ounce and roughly $1.60 at $50 per ounce, which works out to about $3.86 at $120 per ounce.
Cost analyses argue that manufacturing expenses such as clean rooms, coating operations and setup waste dominate the per-roll cost of film, making silver a small fraction of the final price.
Film coating lines carry large fixed costs that have to be spread over limited production runs, and cinema film production can crowd the coating calendar.
The 2026 analog supply chain has been described as fragile: limited manufacturing capacity, reliance on single-source chemical suppliers, and demand growth manufacturers are struggling to meet.
In colour film processing nearly all the silver is removed, leaving only a dye image in the final negative or slide.
In black-and-white processing the silver is split between the final negative and the fixing bath: frames that received more exposure keep more silver in the negative and send less to the fixer.
Minilabs and hospitals recovered silver with electrolytic units that plated it onto cathodes, or with metallic replacement cartridges containing iron that precipitated the silver as sludge.
- The Technology of Silver Recovery for Photographic Processing Facilities (Kodak J-212)125px.com
- Comparison of Discharge Silver Concentrations from Electrolytic Plating and Metallic Replacement Silver Recovery Units: Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association: Vol 53, No 4tandfonline.com
- Refining Silver Recovered from Photographic Processing Facilities125px.com
Kodak Park in Rochester ran a centralized recovery operation that used smelting and electrolytic refining to turn recovered silver back into 99.9 percent pure silver for reuse in film production.
Kodak’s recovery programs at Kodak Park saved over $200 million a year in raw material costs, a figure covering recovered silver, solvents and film base together, not silver alone.
As digital replaced film in the 2000s, silver-bearing waste streams such as fixer and scrap film declined sharply, ending photographic processing’s role as a major source of secondary silver.
The 1979 to 1980 Hunt brothers episode was an attempt to corner the silver market that collapsed on Silver Thursday and helped destroy most of the brothers’ fortune, leading to their bankruptcy in 1988.
As silver prices soared in 1979 to 1980, there was a rush to recover silver from sources including jewelry and coin collections.
On February 11, 1980, the New York Times ran a business story headlined ‘Photo Prices Rise With Silver.’
In a February 1980 statement to Kodak shareowners from the chief executive officer, Walter A. Fallon, Kodak said revenues from recent price increases were designed to offset the rising cost of silver and other materials, not to inflate profits.
Kodak executives said that, facing rising costs in 1979, the company’s employment increased only 1 percent against a 14 percent sales gain.
Kodak said in 1980 that its recovery systems at Kodak Park recaptured over 99 percent of the silver lost in production.
Kodak reported cutting the silver content of its X-ray films by more than 20 percent over a five-year period.
Kodak pursued silver-free technologies around 1980, including Ektaprint copiers and Ektachem colorimetric slides that needed no silver.
