Chemical world This Week during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Before entering government service, he had been chairman of the biology department of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Baldeschwieler, age 37, has been at Stanford since 1965, and before that was on the chemistry faculty at Harvard. In 1967 he received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry. UNEMPLOYMENT:
Labor speaks out Witnesses representing labor groups told the House Subcommittee on Science, Research and Development that present versions of economic conversion legislation are a good start to solve the problem of unemployed engineers and scientists, but that the proposed bills don't go far enough, or necessarily in the right directions. Nor for that matter is labor pleased with Administration efforts to solve the unemployment problem. Retraining has been the grossest kind of deception, Stanford Lenz told the subcommittee on economic conversion legislation. In a prepared statement on behalf of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, AFLCIO-CLC, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO, he cited retraining engineers as teachers when there is already a surplus of teachers. William A. Lucas, in a statement on behalf of the American Federation of Technical Engineers, AFLCIO-CLC, said that the role of formal re-education in the conversion process has been overemphasized. And the ability of the engineer or scientist to adapt has been underestimated. He feels that money could be more effectively used if it were given as a wage subsidy to the unemployed. This would allow small defense R&D firms in the process of conversion, as well as state and local governments, to obtain the services of technically trained scientists or engineers at a fraction of their normal salary. The new employee would obtain his experience on the job. George Gill, chairman of the ad hoc committee of the Council for Scientific, Professional and Cultural Employees (SPACE), in a prepared statement, outlined an 11-point program promulgated by the AFL-CIO executive council. It includes offsetting decreased defense produc8 C&EN JULY 26, 1971
NO ACS member directory Plans for publishing a 1971 ACS membership directory have been tabled. The directory was to have been financed in part by controlled rental of member mailing lists (C&EN, May 24, page 42). Advance orders indicate that only about 1 % of ACS members are interested in receiving such a directory. According to Executive Director Frederick T. Wall, the small interest in a directory suggests that its value to members is not sufficient to overcome the disadvantages of controlled rental and the possible unauthorized commercial use of the member list.
tion with increased public investment and government efforts to create jobs, establishing a public service employment program nationwide, and providing increased federal investment in public facilities and services. EFFLUENTS:
Guidelines impossible The Environmental Protection Agency has abandoned plans to use effluent guidelines as the sole means of determining whether a company gets a permit under the 1899 Refuse Act permit program. Each firm will now be considered separately in relation to the water quality standards for the waterways to which it is discharging, rather than having to meet some industrywide national standard. One reason behind the action, according to William D. Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator, is that EPA has been unable to come up with a base-level effluent standard for a class of industry nationwide. "Whatever base-level effluent standard we set nationwide," he says, "it's bound to be . . . either too strict in terms of the water quality standard that is attempted to be complied with, or it's too lenient in that it doesn't call for enough removal of BOD (biochemRuckelshaus:
too strict or too lenient
ical oxygen demand), or whatever, in order to meet the water quality standards of a particular area." The goal of providing some magic formula that people can put into a computer and get numbers coming out of what a particular industry can discharge has not been achieved, he says. EPA will still issue the effluent guidelines, complete with the effluent computation formulas. According to John R. Quarles, Jr., assistant administrator for enforcement and general counsel, the formulas are to be used only to supplement existing techniques for establishing effluent specifications, and as a quick screening method to see if an industry's effluents are "within a normal range" for a permit. However, he says, the formulas will not reduce the need for exercising professional judgment. Chemical industry spokesmen say that they aren't at all surprised that EPA was unable to come up with a meaningful set of national effluent standards. The chemical industry has long argued, according to one spokesman, that the diversity of chemical products makes it extremely difficult to draw up one effluent standard to apply to all chemicals and all processes. POLLUTION:
Two companies charged Two chemical companies are in trouble because of alleged pollution. Rohm and Haas and Stauffer Chemical have been charged with discharging dangerous materials into the environment from their plants on the Houston Ship Channel, along which is one of the heaviest concentrations of chemical plants in the U.S. In a suit filed a week ago, the Federal Government asked that Rohm and Haas be enjoined from discharging metals, cyanide, and other materials into the channel from its organic chemicals plant at Deer Park, Tex. Four days before the suit was filed, Stauffer agreed to an injunction prohibiting the company from polluting the air by discharges (mainly sulfur oxides) from its sulfuric acid plant in Houston. Stauffer agreed to the injunction following a hearing of the Texas Air Control Board, which confirmed an emergency order of the board's executive secretary, Charles R. Barden, directing Stauffer to stop emit-
