Background: nitrate film stock is flammable, impossible to extinguish, and toxic when in burns. Theoretically a nitrate film might contain a lost and sought-after movie (such as London After Midnight) but it could also be worthless inferior copies that are in bad shape.This question is about useless reels of nitrate film.
Someone was telling me what a pain it is to deal with nitrate, because the safety rules make it very expensive to get rid of any useless reels. To keep it is also costs a lot because there are many requirements to prevent accidents.
For a joke, I suggested feeding it to a goat. But now I wonder, biochemically speaking, what would happen. Anyone with a chemistry background able to say?
After all, poisonous when burned it not the same as poisonous when eaten. So what would happen if a human or an animal ate some antique nitrate film?
[quote=“vbob, post:2, topic:995998, full:true”]
Material Safety Data Sheet for cellulose nitrate link here ; under Ingestion, the pertinent bit seems to be “remove dentures if any”…
[/quote]Interesting, but I’m not sure if this the same stuff. It warns against skin contact. But picking up nitrate film with your bare hands is totally harmless, or else all curators and trainees at film archives would be dead by now.
I googled “remove dentures” MSDS to see if that was a common thing and it does appear to be. I didn’t see anything in common with the handful of MSDSs I looked at. I see it on epoxies, solvents, oils etc.
It appears to be part of the standard ‘do not induce vomiting’ language. I’m taking a WAG that it’s for things that might require the person’s stomach to be pumped and this is to make sure the ER docs don’t knock the person’s dentures into their throat in the process (or maybe it’s so the person doesn’t dislodge/lose them if/when they start vomiting.
Goat person here: goats won’t eat things like that. In fact they are very picky eaters. There’s a myth about them eating everything because they like things that we don’t think of as food, like straw hats, can labels, and your hair. They also like thistles and brambles. But not toxic things.
Rodents however … my daughter’s pet rat once ate a tube of vaseline. Including the tube (left the cap). And the mice infesting my house are very fond of Ivory bar soap.
There was a junkyard full of old cars just outside of Hollywood called memory lane. The studios would often rent cars from here for movie props. It wasn’t uncommon to find cars with a box or two full of old reels. I wonder if this was there way of getting rid of the reels.
Although we are getting into hijack territory, I will say that goats are browsers, not grazers. They evolved to eat many different species of shrubs, vines, trees, and canes – and they’ll eat grass too, but it isn’t their favorite. Because there are many toxic species of browse (unlike grasses), they will eat a few leaves of something new, and then move on, apparently waiting to see how it will affect them before chowing down. Thus, they are unusually difficult to poison.
The inventor of Vaseline, Robert Chesebrough, believed it was healthy to eat it, and claimed that he ate a spoonful of Vaseline every day.
Rats have a wider appetite than perhaps some people realize, but they can be picky eaters. All 19 rats that I’ve owned absolutely LOVE bananas, but aren’t very fond of apples. They LOVE chicken, and chicken bones left in their cage will be reduced to splinters overnight, but they’re not crazy about steak. I’ve never tried to feed them either Vaseline or nitrate film.
Nitrate film is inflammable, but it’s not magical and it can’t teleport. Put it in the middle of an asphalt parking lot away from anything else that it might set on fire and drop a match and it will be gone quickly and cheaply.
Depending on local regulations, the resulting smoke or slag could well be an environmental problem. Crap you or I could get away with doing once is not something that a business can get away with doing in bulk on a regular basis.
My general prejudice is akin to yours: “Hey, it’s flammable? Great, let’s burn it to get rid of it.” But that may not really work as a commercial solution.
[quote=“HoneyBadgerDC, post:9, topic:995998, full:true”]There was a junkyard full of old cars just outside of Hollywood called memory lane. The studios would often rent cars from here for movie props. It wasn’t uncommon to find cars with a box or two full of old reels. I wonder if this was there way of getting rid of the reels.[/quote]Huh, that’s interesting. Probably the reason wasn’t disposal; that would be far too slow. Movie studios must have been swimming in reels of film.
But now I wonder what now-lost movies were in there.
The original question seemed slightly tongue-in-cheek, so my responses were a bit flip and light-hearted… but as is so often the case, it raises interesting questions and new dimensions of personal ignorance to be fought. I wonder if using ChatGPT or its ilk to figure out which parts of of a multitude of MSDS are fairly generic, and which are more specifically significant would be fruitful?
My question was not “how do I get rid of nitrate” so burning it in a parking lot is not a useful reply. Great choice for drug lab rest products, though.
I’d like to think of my original question more as “personal strange curiosity” than “personal ignorance”, if it’s all the same to you. I admit it’s a left-field, out of the box question.
But then, people eat the strangest things. I personally know someone who ate soap at least once.
Just in case: I wasn’t planning to test this myself. Or on any animal.
Sorry - I worded my reply poorly. It is my own personal ignorance that I am fighting. This is an ongoing battle, with many proud victories, and many honorable defeats. As the Straight Dope’s motto indicates, it’s taking longer than I thought…
