EDITORIAL
Enough Pollution to Go Around? To the culturally articulate city of Florence came 700 scientists for a fiveday meeting of F.A.T.I.P.E.C. (Federation of Coatings Technologists in Continental Europe). I n the semidarkness of the Palazzo dei Congressi, it was easy to concentrate upon the technical aspects of a progressive chemical product, i.e., polymer coatings. Seventy-nine presentations by participants from 16 nations pronounced the future (in four languages) as progressive, unending, :md even brilliant in terms of scientific disciplines. There was only one vague mention of unweltschutz (pollution). In the real world contest between new things t o be innovated and present things which are to be cleansed, the conyressistes carry on oblivious of the omnipresence of the latter. Drinking water must be bought in small bottles at big prices. What happened to those Roman springs? Small autos driven like jumping beans exhale molar volumes of chemical junk. The spring-feel Arno flows viscous green. The Cyprus-fringed horizon lacks postcard idealism, thanks to expanding Italian industry. Expensive villas are probably painted with lead, mercury, arsenic, and other “killers” (a journalist’s term) in the lower middle of 3lendeleev’s table. Days later in the Bosnian resort city of Jajce, the same picture: a chemical plant competing with a paper mill to fill the cupped confluence of two valleys with acidic emerald aerosol. Every industrial event has two technologies: one necessary t o survive, another to advance. These are twins but not identical, in a sense, antipodal. Research planning is complicated by the amphoteric nature of man’s neglect and the mystical call to create, two functions of technology in purposeful competition.
If the high cost of producing the technical papers (certainly multimillion dollars) is considered very frankly, the presentation of classical progressive results was low key. Much was unexciting and old. Privately, we learn the reason: the swing to ecological concerns. Robbing progress to pay for survival. Attendance was reduced by 25% over previous such meetings. Universally, the once exclusive dedication to creative result is diminished by the proportionate application of talents to past neglect. The world may have decided it cannot afford to do both in equal measure. Here is tangible evidence that some research organizations are drawn into a whirlpool of pollution projects at the expense of former primary objectives, not a totally destructive habit in view of the meritorious desire to depurate the environment, but latently self-defeating in terms of substantive advances. Despite today’s museum-piece opulence of Firenze, life was complex for the Medici, who did not survive, as it also is for us who shall.
Dubromik J u n e 24,1972 /’-
Ind. Eng. Chem. Prod. Res. Develop., Vol. 1 1 , No. 3, 1972
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