are the most promising candidates to become the next major rubber in tires, Mr. Keener believes. Two top rea sons: cheap raw materials, outstand ing resistance to ozone. A good deal of development remains to be done, but Mr. Keener still thinks that the rubber industry will be able to build EPT into better tires, either conven tional ply or radial ply. ( For more on EPT, s e e p a g e 24.) Mr. Keener expects the use of stereo rubbers over-all to grow about 10% per year, much faster than total do mestic consumption. "General-pur pose styrene-butadiene rubber, the workhorse of the tire industry, is ap parently approaching its peak in us age, and will be pushed more and more in the years to come by the new stereo rubbers/' he says. Total U.S. consumption of SBR, now estimated at more than 1 million long tons a year, should start to decline in a year or so, depending on the cost and price performance of the new rubbers, the Goodrich president says.
Three-Day Program Commemorates Patent System Patent Commissioner Edward Brenner (left), vice chairman James Kennedy of Celanese Corp., and Secretary of Commerce John Connor conversed briefly last week at Celanese display in the Progress of Industry Through Patents exhibit in the Commerce building. The exhibit was part of a three-day program commemorating the 175th anniversary of the U.S. patent system. The Patent Office has issued more than 3.2 million patents, including Patent No. 6469 (on a device for buoying vessels over shoals) issued May 22, 1849, to Abraham Lincoln.
President Signs Auto Exhaust Control Law, New Solid Waste Disposal Legislation The Government assumed doublebarreled powers against land and air pollution last week as President Johnson, recuperating from surgery, signed into law an amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1963 and a new Solid Waste Disposal Act. The legis lation journeyed through Congress as a single measure, but became separate laws under Presidential signature. The merger of the laws into a single measure as S. 306 apparently made good political sense to sponsoring Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D.-Me.) who saw trash disposal and air pollution as sufficiently linked to merit twin treat ment. In brief, the air pollution amend ment (Title I) will require control of automotive emissions beginning with the 1968 models; and the waste dis posal law (Title II) embeds the Gov ernment $92.5 million deep into the business of making trash more useful or getting rid of it more cleanly. Title I will be run by the Public Health Service's Division of Air Pollution Control. PHS's not-too-widely-her alded Division of Environmental En gineering and Food Protection and the Interior Department's Bureau of
Mines will share administration of Title II. Title I is in reality an amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1963. Passed in December of that year, the meas ure gave PHS powers to impose abate ment orders on offending industries and localities. It also expanded fed eral involvement in research and con trol projects with a $95 million grant program spread over four years through 1967. These two features remain unchanged. The additional wrinkle is control over automotive ex hausts. Armed with this power, John H. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Educa tion, and Welfare, will promulgate by the end of 1968 exhaust control stand ards similar to those now in effect in California (275 p.p.m. hydrocarbons and 1.5% carbon monoxide by vol ume). But the Government isn't ex pected to rest on those numbers, which air pollution experts consider too lenient. In about a year, Mr. Gardner is expected to press for hy drocarbon levels of 180 p.p.m. and CO concentrations of 1% starting with the 1970 models. The standards will ap ply to foreign imports as well. Penal
ties will include $1000 fine per offend ing vehicle. Meanwhile, the stage is being set for the first series of enforcement ac tions against interstate air polluters. Under enforcement chief S. Smith Griswold, the division will hold con ferences Nov. 13 in Selbyville, Del., against Bishop Processing Co. of Bishop, Md., and Nov. 30 at Shoreham, Vt., against International Paper Co. of Ticonderoga, N.Y. And by the end of the year, a big attraction should be enforcement procedures against some New Jersey industries. Enforce ment procedures follow the same con ference-hearing-court route as under the water pollution control law. The trash disposal legislation was quietly herded through Congress un der the fireworks generated by the debate over controlling auto emissions. It is a $92,5 million program of local demonstration plants designed to turn refuse into fertile soil, harmless vapor, or revolutionary new raw material. Under this legislation, about $60.2 million allocated to PHS will go to ward such projects as eliminating soot ejection from New York City apart ment incinerators and building better town dump incinerators. The rest is for new metallurgical processes aimed at converting mineral industry wastes into useful by-products. The Bureau , of Mines will run this program. OCT.
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Two Assume New Posts at Stauffer Chemical Dr. Chester L. Arnold (left) has become v.p. and general manager of Stauffer's plas tics division. Sam S. Emison (right)., a senior v.p. and director, assumes adminis trative responsibility for the company's technical depart ment (patents, market re search, corporate develop ment, licensing). Both men will continue to be head quartered in New York.
Paper Industry Warned To Improve Research The more than 450 registrants at last week's meeting of the American Paper Institute heard a warning from the Institute of Paper Chemistry's Roy P. Whitney: "If the paper industry is to remain healthy and vigorous, more ef fort must be invested in well-con ceived, imaginative, and daring re search and development activities." At the same meeting, president Joseph M. Murtha, of Sandgren & Murtha, a design and marketing firm, told the industry representatives that paper is lagging in glamour as a packaging material. In New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Dr. Whitney said that the pa per industry's response to the rapidly changing world of science and tech nology is in some respects excellent, but in others there is cause for con cern. He says that the industry's ef forts to maintain an evolving technol ogy can be divided into two catego ries—attempts to do things better, such as increase efficiency and yields; and attempts to develop new and dif ferent techniques and technologies. It is in the second category that he feels the industry is lacking. Mr. Murtha says that sales of paper and paperboard products represent about $7 billion of the $14 billion packaging market. However, paper's growth rate is not keeping up with those of other packaging materials. For example, in 1947-63, flexible packaging materials, such as films and foils, grew 3 6 3 % ; metal containers and components, 162%; and paper and paperboard containers, 1 6 1 % . Mr. Murtha points out that it is easy to rationalize that rates of increase are 24
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easy to achieve when one starts with no position whatever in the market. "Nevertheless," he says, "projections for flexible packaging materials indi cate stormy seas for the competition." The main weakness of the paper industry, according to Mr. Murtha, is that paper companies have been pro duction oriented, rather than market oriented. He says that the industry spends $65 million annually for re search, with 80% of it going into to day's processes, rather than to end uses for paper.
Mass Spectrometer Tracks NO in Exhaust A small, portable mass spectrometer that continuously monitors nitric ox ide concentration in automotive ex haust gas was revealed at last week's Anachem Conference, in Detroit Mich. The rapid response of the mass spec trometer (A.E.I. MS-10) allows it to monitor the oxides under conditions used in the California Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board test cycle. J. C. Neerman and R. M. Campau of Ford Motor's engineering and re search staff in Dearborn, Mich., who developed the technique, have meas ured nitric oxide concentrations from 200 to 400 p.p.m. The spectrometer and sampling system will detect 9 5 % of the nitrogen oxides present within three seconds after an abrupt change in concentration. Exhaust contains some unreacted oxygen, causing oxidation to start rap idly. In batch-type wet chemical methods, therefore, both nitrogen ox ide and dioxide must be measured. The new method eliminates depend ence on wet analysis.
New Patent; License Add to ΈΡΤ Confusion Hercules gets patent; U.S. Rubber links with Ziegler/Montecatini The tortuous patent licensing path ways many companies are following with ethylene-propylene-teipolymer (EPT rubber) may not be any simpler as a result of the patent granted to Hercules and the licensing agreement between U.S. Rubber, Prof. Karl Ziegler, and Montecatini. But some guideposts may eventually stem from the two events. The Hercules composition of matter patent (U.S. 3,211,709) covers terpolymers made of ethylene, propyl ene, and a third monomer, such as dicyclopentadiene and norbornene de rivatives. The U.S. Rubber-ZieglerMontecatini arrangement, disclosed last week, is for the American firm to manufacture, use, and sell EPT rubber containing dicyclopentadiene. The major patent involved here is U.S. 3,113,115 (held -by Prof. Ziegler), which covers catalysts for making the rubber. U.S. Rubber believes it now holds necessary licenses to cover its operations. The new patent came to Hercules by way of Great Britain's Dunlop Rub ber Co. Hercules purchased the U.S. patent application rights from Dunlop in 1961. The claims in the patent in clude sulfur-vulcanizable elastomeric copolymers of at least two straightchain α-olefins (of from two to 10 car bon atoms) and an ethylenically un saturated bridged-ring hydrocarbon containing two ethylenic double bonds (one of which must be in the bridged ring) and having seven to 20 carbons. The patent thus seems to cover some of the ground already covered by Du Pont patents issued earlier. The Du Pont patents include dicyclopenta diene (U.S. 3,000,866), methylene norbornene (U.S. 3,093,621), and alkenyl norbornenes (U.S. 3,093,620; C&EN, Jan. 8, 1962, page 25). In 1964, Hercules won an interference which it filed on the Du Pont patent for dicyclopentadiene. However, Du Pont says it can't see any effect on its operations now or in the foreseeable future because of the Hercules patent. Behind Du Pont's position is another patent (U.S. 2,933,480) on 1,4-hexadiene, the third ingredient in Nordel, Du Pont's sulfurcured EPT rubber.
