THE CHEMICAL WORLD THIS WEEK
NONPROFIT GROUPS:
Brode Testifies on Taxes
FWPCA's Stein Closer look at agriculture
second session last week. Besides FWPCA, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin were represented. The treatment Mr. Stein referred to was secondary treatment of all wastes ( chlorination by May 1969) and an 80% reduction of total phosphorus content in the Lake Michigan basin by December 1972. The states reported that it appears as if nearly all industries and municipalities in their jurisdictions will be in compliance by that date. However, Mr. Stein's euphoria did not extend to other sources of pollution: "Agriculture doesn't yet realize its role in pollution." This conference needs to look at this area closely and to control pollution from agricultural runoff, he said. The Lake Michigan Basin Conference is also looking into other possible sources of lake pollution. These include thermal pollution, radioactive wastes, pesticides, oil, algae, chlorides, and sulfates. Illinois* solution to the Lake Michigan pollution problem is unique among the states, but well established in Illinois. Currently, most wastes from Chicago and adjoining areas that might enter the lake are diverted through the Illinois waterway system to the Mississippi River. Hence, Illinois will have solved its part of the pollution problem by not discharging anything into the lake or its tributaries. Michigan appears to have its pollution abatement financing under control with the $335 million bond issue passed last November. However, there were cries from Indiana and Wisconsin that their control projects are being held up by lack of federal grants that had been authorized but not funded under U.S. Public Law 84-660. The law authorizes up to a 50% federal grant for the cost of pollution control projects. 12 C&EN MARCH 3, 1969
American Chemical Society President Wallace R. Brode called on Congress last week to abolish the year-old tax on the advertising income of magazines and other periodicals published by tax-exempt organizations such as ACS. Testifying at the House Ways and Means Committee's continuing hearings on tax reforms, the ACS president attacked new rules issued by the Internal Revenue Service late in 1967 which made such advertising income subject to taxation for the first time starting last year. Dr. Brode challenges the legality of the regulations and the agency's authority to impose such a levy. IRS's position is that it is okay for a tax-exempt organization to publish editorial material related to its taxexempt function. But the advertising content of such publications is a separate and distinct entity from their editorial content and is unrelated to the organization's tax-exempt function. Hence, it constitutes "unrelated business income" and is taxable. But Dr. Brode contends that the 1RS regulations are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and contrary to the intent of Congress. He called the committee's attention to the landmark Grosjean vs. American Press case of the mid-thirties in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that advertising cannot be separated from other editorial content in a publication and singled out for taxation. "This was found to be an abrogation of the first amendment of the Constitution," he added. Dr. Brode labels the rules "discriminatory" in that they do not levy the
ACS President Brode Asks return to tax exempt status
tax on the business of ACS as a whole, as is done with a normal for-profit business, but against "an inseparable part of an exempt function." The 20 ACS journals all are "clearly devoted to one or another of the scientific and teaching aspects of the discipline of chemistry," Dr. Brode explains. The advertising carried in some of these journals, he says, "is merely an incidental extension of these journals which helps in a small way to defray the overall costs of publication and to assist the Society" in carrying out its exempt function. Dr. Brode urges the committee to direct 1RS to repeal the 1967 regulations. Short of that, he asks the committee to include in its proposed tax revision bill language "which would make it abundantly clear that the 1RS is not to attempt to declare as unrelated business income that advertising income generated by advertising in magazines which is clearly related to the exempt function of the organization in question."
CAUSTIC SODA:
No Glut Yet Bigness and efficiency do not always go hand in hand, yet it is the size and diversity of the U.S. chemical industry that account for the existing healthy supply-demand picture for both chlorine and caustic soda. In fact, the feared glut of a few years ago in caustic supplies has not developed. Caustic at present is in tight supply. Even the long-term outlook which pits a 7 or 8% a year growth rate for chlorine against a 5% compounded rate for caustic isn't as gloomy as it may appear at first glance. The large chlorine producers in the U.S. are capable of shifting markets between soda ash and caustic soda to solve the perennial headache of balancing caustic soda-chlorine consumptions. It is, therefore, the total sodium oxide (Na^O) market that promises to solve any future oversupply problems for caustic soda. While sodium oxide uses will grow about 5% a year to 1973, the growth will be from a larger base than chlorine. As one expert in the field puts it, "Soda ash will become the flywheel for caustic." Already caustic soda has replaced soda ash in aluminum potlines. It may accomplish a similar replacement in the glass industry. Last year, 8.46 million tons of chlorine were produced, according to the Chlorine Institute. About 93% of this production was from sodium chloride brines and accounted for some 8.69 million tons of by-product caustic soda. The remaining 7% was made
PPG's Lake Charles plant 640 tons per day from one circuit
from potassium chloride brines or in sodium cells that make no sodium hydroxide by-product. Industry chlorine capacity was about 8.8 million tons in 1968. This year another 1 million tons of chlorine capacity will go on stream; almost all of it will be based on sodium chloride brine. At Lake Charles, La., PPG Industries has started up the largest singlecircuit mercury cell plant in the U.S. It will produce about 640 tons per day of chlorine using de Nora mercury cells. The PPG installation takes advantage of the economies of large circuits and the increased operating efficiency of dimensionally stable electrodes (C&EN, Feb. 10, page 7 1 ) . While the anodes may initially cause chlorine producers to favor mercury cell units, they can also be used in diaphragm cells.
OIL IMPORTS:
Up to the White House The petrochemical industry's Washington corps was frantically at work last week on a top-priority assignment: trying to get the ear of Presidential aide Robert Ellsworth. The balding, 42-year-old former Republican Congressman from Kansas and national political director of the 1968 Nixon campaign was thrust from his hitherto shadowy role as White House troubleshooter into the petrochemical limelight 11 days ago when President Nixon announced that he has shifted responsibility for oil import policy from the Department of Interior to the White House and ordered Ellsworth to
head a review of oil import problems. Former President Johnson officially transferred major responsibility for oil policy from the White House to the Secretary of Interior shortly after taking office to avoid possible charges of conflict of interest arising out of his being from a major oil-producing state. In a memo to Interior Secretary Hickel, President Nixon said he was reassuming "full responsibility'* for oil import policy because "A wide range of complex and highly important issues affecting the nation's oil import policies must be dealt with in the near future. These issues, which have not been examined in depth for a decade, are of such moment to the United States and the impact on national policy is so far reaching that they require extensive review in detail and in the aggregate." He did not set a time limit on the review. Secretary Hickel—whose appointment has come under heavy attack from oil import policy liberals because
President Nixon Shifts oil import policy to White House
of the former Alaska governor's alleged domestic oil interest sympathies—says that he agrees with the President that oil import policy decisions should be made at the White House level "because of the wide spectrum of questions, both domestic and foreign, involved." Outside the Administration, however, the President's action was greeted with considerable skepticism. Some members of the New England Congressional delegation charge that it is nothing more than an oil industryinspired scheme to stall action on Occidental Petroleum's controversial plan to build a 300,000 barrel-a-day refinery within a proposed foreign trade subzone at Machiasport, Me., to supply fuel oil to the New England area.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTS:
Shortage in Academia Colleges and universities throughout the U.S. are beating the barren bushes for analytical chemistry professors. Letters announcing permanent analytical teaching openings are piling up on the desks of chemistry department heads at universities such as Illinois, Wisconsin, Purdue, Louisiana State (Baton Rouge), and Maryland. "Purdue has been notified of over 40 academic analytical vacancies this year," says Dr. L. B. "Buck" Rogers, the university's analytical division chief. And Illinois has received letters announcing openings from 36 different schools in the past four months, Dr. Richard S. Juvet, chairman of the University of Illinois Section of ACS, tells C&EN. "Roughly three quarters of the academic job openings we've heard about have been in analytical chemistry," says Dr. Irving Shain, chairman of Wisconsin's chemistry department. Even universities known as analytical strongholds are looking for analytical chemistry professors. Wisconsin, for example, is trying to fill two openings. And Purdue, Minnesota, Michigan, LSU, Pennsylvania State, Indiana, and North Carolina have also announced analytical vacancies, Dr. Juvet says. Many analytical chemistry openings are in medical schools, Dr. Shain notes. The analytical chemist is playing an increasingly important role in biochemistry and medicine, and many medical schools are hunting for welltrained analytical chemists to teach their students modern methods of analysis and to do medically related analytical research. A number of reasons are given for the present shortage of academic analytical chemists. Part of the blame rests with the analytical professor who hasn't kept his courses up to date, and who, by not teaching analytical chemistry "as it is," has failed to interest his students in an analytical career. Another culprit is the shortsighted chemistry department head who loads his department with theoreticians who then opt for a gradual phasing out of analytical chemistry from the curriculum. And then, of course, there is industry, which in its desperate search for qualified analytical chemists, is offering a salary of more than $15,000 a year to a Ph.D. just out of school. Most top-flight chemistry departments require postdoctoral experience from their incoming physical, organic, inorganic, and biochemistry staff members. But they will welcome with open arms an analytical man before the signatures have dried on his Ph.D. thesis. MARCH 3, 1969 C&EN
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