EDITORIAL
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Foam Fractionation in Water Ecology
Layout a n d Production Joseph Jacobs, Ait Director, Leroy Corcoran, Bill Caldwell (Layout) Production-Easton, Associate Editor:
he chemical industry, in the past few years, has spent a quarter
Tbillion dollars on developing biodegradable detergents to remove
Pa. Charlotte C. Sayre
Eastern Editorial Bureau Manager: Walter S. Fedor (New York)
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g.
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the foaming tendency from municipal waste streams. So why do we feature this month (page 40) an article on using foaming tendency as the basis on which to treat these streams? We do so because we feel that biodegradable detergents and improved waste treatment processes are both manifestations of a significant change under way in the technology of water use and reuse. The water supply-recovery situation is very complex and difficult to manipulate ; detergent structure improvements or impurity removal processes by themselves cannot solve the problems. A systems approach is called for-an approach in which whole watersheds are treated as single systems. On such a grand scale, biodegradability becomes just one variable of many, and is in itself no cure for any ill. I t has received so much recent attention as a result of three major factors-sociopolitical pressures, a tight-knit, technology-rich detergent industry, and a diffuse, technology-poor waste treatment “industry.” Other significant variables in the grand system to be analyzed therefore lag behind biodegradability in terms of the technical attention they have so far received. Such a variable is the processing of municiple and industrial wastes, and foam fractionation as described in our pages this month is a part of that variable. Brunner and Stephan report progress in understanding and using this process for waste treatment. The step they have taken should lead to many more steps in this specific area and be accompanied by equivalent efforts in other variables of water ecology. At the same time, we note beginnings on the ‘‘cosmic” scale. The State of California has granted $100,000 to Aerojet-General to “study how to undertake studies” of this problem, as The Economist of March 20 put it. “At a time when new technology and new problems are piling up side by side, it is ridiculous for the government not to use one to deal with the other,’’ says California’s director of finance Hale Champion in defining the idea behind this small contract and a couple of others in other areas of California’s social need. Hence, from money industry spends on profit-oriented R&D; from the money Defense/Space spends on technology for national security; from the money government agencies spend on the general welfare such as pollution control, comes new technology in great or small chunks. We must bear in mind that a more general perspective than any of these exists, and that technology from one specialty is more readily transferable to others when viewed from the general perspective. It is in this context that we present foam fractionation as a process proposed for cleansing municipal waste streams. We can’t help thinking how ironic it would be if, a decade or so from now, we should find it necessary to add foaming agents to these waste streams to make up for the loss in foaming tendency resulting from the current switch to biodegradable detergents.
VOL. 5 7
NO. 5
MAY 1965
5
