Rational rules urged to control pollution U.S. lawmakers should find a rational basis for establishing pollution control standards, Dr. Herbert A. Laitinen of Florida State University told members of the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA) in New York City last week. Analytical chemist Laitinen expressed this view in his acceptance speech for the 1975 SOCMA Gold Medal honoring his work in promoting environmental chemistry. He also is editor of Analytical Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society. At the heart of the issue, Laitinen
Laitinen: a tyranny of lawmakers
told SOCMA, is the analytical chemists' increasing ability to detect minute amounts of potentially harmful chemicals and materials in the environment. For example, he cites the recent discovery of a host of organic compounds, albeit in very low concentrations, in the drinking water of New Orleans. "All of this sounds pretty alarming," he said, "at least until we consider the analytical results quantitatively. In the case of chloroform, this was for a long time a time-honored component of certain cough medicines. Someone calculated that to ingest an amount of chloroform equal to that contained in a teaspoon of cough syrup would require drinking something like 250 gal of water." Moreover, Laitinen claims that there will be more such situations, not because the quality of the environment is deteriorating but because of advancing analytical technology. Then whom do you blame? The chemist who found the pollutants? The people who put them there? Or the lawmakers who write statutes so rigid that eventually 8
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they must be violated? "If there is a tyranny in pollution control laws," he says, "it is not a tyranny of the analytical chemist, but a tyranny of lawmakers." A rational approach to pollution control legislation, Laitinen affirms, "should not be based on the sensitivity of available analytical methods but in relation to a natural background where that [pollution] exists." He points out that, by and large, no one really knows whether there is a threshold limit below which a potential carcinogen will never produce cancer. •
Dow turns to shrimp to clean up wastes Dow Chemical hopes to use tiny brine shrimp to clean up wastes from its Freeport, Tex., plants. The proposed system will use algae and, in turn, the shrimp to consume bacterial wastes produced in the 250acre waste treatment facility of Dow's Texas division. The scheme must be approved by the Texas Water Quality Board. According to Dow, it will be cheaper to build and run than a conventional solids waste removal system. Dow engineers currently are designing a pilot plant. Construction is expected to begin in mid-October. Some limited work has been done on using brine shrimp to handle municipal wastes. The Dow development apparently represents their first use for industrial wastes. Today the main commercial use for brine shrimp, which usually are less than V4 inch long, is in fish food. According to Dow, a protein concentrate made from the shrimp and their eggs could be sold profitably from the proposed operation. However, yet to be determined is whether the shrimp will pick up toxic materials from the plant wastes. Everett Jacob, general manager of Dow's Texas division, has told the Texas Water Quality Board, which likely will hold a hearing on the scheme, that installation costs for a full-scale operation will be $1.5 million. Annual operating costs will be about $500,000. A conventional solid waste removal system now under construction at the Dow Texas division and scheduled to go into operation next April will cost about $7 million, Jacob says. Annual operating costs will be $1.5 million to $7 million, depending on chemicals needed to make it operate efficiently. Part of the operating costs will go for large
quantities of bauxite used each day along with 40,000 gal of fresh water, and about 100,000 kwh of electricity to power pumps in an oxidation pond. In contrast, the bio-clarification system would need neither bauxite nor fresh water, and only a few hundred kilowatt-hours daily. •
Chemical spending relatively strong As a notable exception to the general economy, capital spending plans for the chemical industry have held up quite well over the past year. Although companies in other areas have greatly reduced their planned expenditures, chemical capital spending, though not growing by the leaps and bounds that characterized it during the early 1970's, has roughly kept pace with inflation. This trend is continuing, according to a survey of capital appropriations for the country's 1000 largest manufacturers released last week by the Conference Board. The survey measures capital spending plans announced during the second quarter. Preliminary figures place these announcements at $2.06 billion for the chemicals and allied products industry during the quarter. This is an all-time high just passing the $2.04 billion in planned capital expenditures announced in the third quarter of 1974. In constant dollars, the secondquarter appropriations are 12% below appropriations made in the second quarter of last year. After accounting for inflation, appropriations for chemicals have fluctuated within a 15% range since mid-1973. By contrast, appropriations for all manufacturing have fallen 48% to their current level from their peak in the third quarter of last year. But the drop in capital appropriations for all manufacturing may be about to end, according to Conference Board economist Elliot Grossman. "With corporations' after-tax profits expected to increase after hitting bottom in the first quarter of this year, inflation (as measured by the gross national product deflator) slowing from the doubledigit rates of 1974, and the money supply rising at an annual rate of about 7.5%, appropriations are likely to begin climbing in the third quarter of this year and to continue rising through 1976," Grossman predicts. For this year, the Conference Board expects capital appropriations to be 22% below their 1974 level but to show a 21% gain in 1976 over 1975. •
