Sugar Factory Waste SuffocatesFish. Wanted: a way to keep beet sugar factories from smothering fish This is not just another nonsense sentence, hut a serious problem in industrial chemistry. For one af the mast difficult classes of industrial waste t o handle is the waste liquor from beet sugar factories. I t contains easily fermentable sugar and other carbohydrates, and the bacteria feeding an these substances use up all the oxygen in the water, so that the poor fish have nothing to breathe. They are not poisoned hy this factory waste, but suffocated. At the great Rothamsted Experimental Station near London, bacteriologists are devoting much research toward the finding of ways to free sugar factory waste from mast of its fermentable materials before discharging it into the rivers. Two methods that look promising involve holding the liquor in tanks or cisterns and speeding up the fermentation process to ccrrpletian before discharge. A third, which seems t o he the best, consists of a percolating filtration, which has given a purification of 95 per cent, measured on the basis of oxygen absorption. Actual trials a t a beet sugar factory indicate t h a t the aethod has promise, although certain rr-echanical diEculties still have to he overcame.-Science Service
