Monstrous waste plle
DEARSIR: The story, “Can plastics be incinerated safely?” ( ES&T, August 197 1, p 6 6 7 ) states that the U.S. production of solid waste handled by municipal authorities is more than 190 million tons per capita each year. This is more than 500,000 tons per person per day-impossible to believe! There must be some mistake.
P. R. Bolton Environmental Sciences Dept. Reynolds Elect. & Eng. Co. P.O. Box 14400 Las Vegas, Nev. 89114 Indeed there is! The words “per capita” should not have appeared. W e regret the error-Ed.
Instrument reliability
pelletize ammonia sulfate reclaim metallurgical powders incinerate volatiles of filter cake regenerate a catalyst dry (fine) materials in a recycling process Of course, it’s always made good (business) sense to reclaim valuable materials when it was economical to do so. Ecology now adds another sensible reason. With Calciners, Dryers, Coolers and Fluid Bed Processors (lab unit shown above) . . . we’ve been in the “reclamation equipment business” for years. With our Tumble Burner installations for waste disposal . . . we’re off and running in incineration, too.
whether you want to get rid of it . . . or reuse i t . . . start with
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DEARSIR: The feature article in your August issue by Hochheiser, Burmann, and Morgan (“Atmospheric surveillance: The current state of air monitoring technology,” p 678) provides much useful information concerning this subject. As a scientist involved in directing a closely related program in EPA on the development, evaluation, and standardization of instrumentation and methods, I believe several supporting comments should be useful. Many of the newer instruments were developed or evaluated in EPA laboratories or by our contractors. We are very concerned, as is Mr. Levadie (in his letter published on p 978 of your October 1971 issue), with the need to develop new instruments which require less calibration, maintenance, and less downtime than d o older instruments. Only by several years of routine use in monitoring networks can our progress be determined. Within our program of standardization, we not only develop reference calibration techniques in our laboratories and with NBS but have a collaborative testing activity. The methods tested come from the recommendations of the Intersociety Committee on which the American Chemical SOciety has representatives and from an EPA methods advisory group. The collaborative testing work is conducted with contractual support by Southwest Research Institute. Three (Continued on page 1073)
