This is a philosophical question and we cannot answer it for you.

Yes, our films, like any other films, color and black and white, manufactured by whichever company, contain gelatin.

You will not find any coated product in the entire imaging industry, apart from hand-made wet collodion plates, which do not contain gelatin. This also includes inkjet papers.

Gelatin-free films or papers have never existed.
Gelatin is irreplaceable if you want to manufacture a quality product. In the 50ies and 60ies millions of dollars were devoted to research projects trying to find alternatives in the US, Germany, Japan and Russia, but after 20 years everyone gave up with no result.

Gelatin is also the product of choice if you are generally interested in this planet and sustainability.
It is a natural product which is bio degradable and uses water as a natural solvent. This is very ecological.

If you were to use a different colloid, you need to use toxic solvents which then might get released into the environment during product dry-down, and plastics, which add to the pollution of the earth.

Gelatin is manufactured from skeletons of dead animals -yes- but, after all ,animals will die at a certain point and for sure no animals are killed especially for making gelatin. Rather they are killed for their meat and byproducts arise in large amounts. Not eating meat really helps in achieving the goals of reducing human kettle raising, but not using film will have no impact at all.

The photographic industry today is so unimportant, that we are using less than 1/1.000.000.000 of the animal byproducts which arise from the meat industry.

Most of this is treated and converted into animal food  because there is no better use for it (like manufacturing film gelatin).

Per film the amount of gelatin is very small. We are coating with about 3-9 grams per sqm which equals 16 films.

So the bones of one dead horse can deliver enough gelatin for tens of thousands of films.

It´s your decision.

We cannot do anything else but publishing this info and being honest about the fact that we cannot replace gelatin even if we were given millions of dollars to do so.

ADOX, Germany

Manufacturer of silver halide products.