News of the Week The restructuring process began July 1, and the new chemical compa ny structure is slated to be in place by Oct. 1. The firm says the process of leaving certain businesses and closing smaller plants will have be gun by that time, but completion of the restructuring process may take several years. Plants to be closed include those in Carson and Long Beach, Calif., and Everett, Mass. Manufacture of linear alkylbenzene at Carson will be consolidated at Monsanto's Choc olate Bayou plant in Alvin, Tex., where the company has invested about $35 million during the past five years in capacity additions and quality improvement. Customers for phosphoric acid and salts from Long Beach will be served from other plants in St. Louis; Trenton, Mich.; and Augusta, Ga. The Everett plant, expected to close by the end of 1992, manufactures wa ter treatment chemicals, polymer modifiers, and specialty resins. The company is in the process of deter mining the best way to supply cus tomers with these products. William Storck
Cocaine smuggled as ingredient in plastic Drug smugglers have devised a scheme of compounding cocaine with polystyrene, and molding the resin into plastic parts for shipment. Their apparent aim was to recover the drug, after import into the U.S., by extracting the cocaine from dis solved resin. Evidence exposing the scheme was developed by a forensic chemist at the Federal Bureau of In vestigation. Authorities suspect that this is not the first use of the scheme. The case began when Florida state authorities in Miami learned of traf fic in certain solvents, acids, and bases characteristic of cocaine pro cessing. Tracing these chemicals led them to a shipment of almost 30,000 cylindrical black plastic parts weigh ing about 1800 lb. However, usual wet chemical tests failed to detect cocaine in such a matrix. Already cooperating with Florida authorities, the FBI sent chemist Dean Fetterolf to Miami. Fetterolf, β
July 8, 1991 C&EN
who is with the Forensic Science Re search & Training Center at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., brought both an enzyme immunoassay field kit and a portable ion mobility spec trometer. With the kit, he detected cocaine qualitatively on the plastic part surfaces. He confirmed its pres ence and estimated the content at 20% with the spectrometer. Made for the FBI by Bio-Metric Systems, Eden Prairie, Minn., the immunoassay kit contains a hinged module with an absorbing disk in each half. One disk bears an anti body against cocaine. Applying to that disk a few drops of solution ob tained by swabbing the plastic parts enabled the antibody to bind the co caine from their surfaces. Next, a so lution of cocaine standard bound to glucose oxidase was applied to the disk. Because the solution from the parts contained cocaine, which used up some antibody, the remaining antibody could not bind all of the cocaine-enzyme standard.
Closing the module presses the first disk against the second. This re sults in transfer of unbound cocaineenzyme conjugate to the second disk, which contains glucose and horseradish peroxidase. Reaction of glucose oxidase with glucose liberat ed hydrogen peroxide, which in turn was consumed by the horserad ish peroxidase, causing a dye in the second disk to turn green. The portable spectrometer, ob tained from Barringer Instruments, South Plainfield, N.J., contained a nickel-63 foil ionization source. "Vacuuming" the surfaces of the plastic parts and passing the air stream through a filter left cocaine on the filter. Heating the filter desorbed the cocaine into the spec trometer sample inlet. Acceleration of cocaine ions in an electric field caused collisions with inert "drift ing gas" molecules, slowing the ions and giving them a diagnostic mobil ity measured in milliseconds. Stephen Stinson
Little progress made on global warming treaty On June 28 in Geneva, the second round of formal talks on an interna tional treaty to protect global cli mate ended—without producing so much as a draft text on which to base the next set of negotiations, scheduled for September. However, the United Nationssponsored Intergovernmental Nego tiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC) did manage to choose leaders for its two working groups—a job it originally had hoped to complete at its first meeting in February (C&EN, Feb. 25, page 13). The UN General Assembly, which set up the committee last December, asked INC to have a framework con vention (general treaty) on climate change ready to be signed at the UN Conference on Environment & De velopment, to be held next June in Rio de Janeiro. With less than a year remaining, the negotiators have a long way to go. Negotiations keep bogging down over the contentious issue of wheth er the treaty should require industri alized nations to stabilize or reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the
turn of the century. Most European nations have already made commit ments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and want to include binding reduction targets. The U.S., however, contends that targets are unrealistic, and that the treaty should be more flexible. Since the industrialized world created the problem, developing countries argue that they should not be expected to pay the price. They want the treaty to include provi sions for technology transfer and fi nancial aid, both to help them de velop clean energy sources and to contend with adverse effects of cli mate change. "I'm optimistic the U.S. will realize emissions reductions even if we nev er formally set targets, because the newer economic studies are showing we save money by cutting emis sions," says John C Topping Jr., pres ident of the Washington, D.C.-based Climate Institute. "The problem is that if we don't commit ourselves, we could provide an excuse for other countries like India and China to stay outside the treaty process." Pamela Zurer
