ABSTRACT
I usually introduce the keynote speaker, so 1 am not quite sure how to do this. I thought I should talk about some of the things in the field that have occurred in the past which many times we do not give recognition to, and try to prognosticate some things that will happen in the future. I told Dr. Wukasch that there was a slight error in the program because this is the 44th, not the 45th Conference. The first conference was entitled the Purdue Industrial Waste Utilization Conference. By the time the second conference came around we had dropped the word “utilization” from the title. I also did a little study on the people who were on the program at the first conference, and to the best of my knowledge there is only one who remains alive, and that is Roy F. Weston. Roy at that time was the sanitary engineer for a refining company. When you read a list of who was on the first program, you find that there were many famous people. Wilhelm Rudolphs was one of the speakers; F. W. Mohlmann (many of you may remember something about a sludge volume index being taught to you by your professor); Treblor, who at that time was reporting all about dairy wastes; Sandborn, who at that time was the head of National Canners Association; and a guy by the name of George Erganian, who was a graduate student and showed slides at the conference. For those of you who do not remember George, he is one of the more recently retired senior partners of HNTB. But I think that the topic at the conference which was to me most interesting was when Treblor talked about the fact that if you’re going to solve all the dairy wastes problems, you have to do it by having them stop losing the products in the plant. He wasn’t talking about how you treated the waste from a milk processing plant. The one thing that dated his article was the statement that, “the worst thing they do in a dairy is the way they design milk cans. If we could only design a milk can that would drain better, we would be able to eliminate a lot of the waste problems.” As you may know, we no longer put milk in cans to transport it. It was interesting, however, that his whole emphasis was on recovery and stopping losses in the plant. Then Mohlmann, who was the head of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago at that time, talked about the fact that the Sanitary District had run more than 300 industrial waste surveys (each of two-week duration) with the sole purpose of going back into the industries and helping them cut their losses, rather than talking about how they should treat their wastewaters. The fact he presented that was most interesting was that they showed a processor of corn how to bottle up the industry to the point to where they were saving some 1,000 bushels a week of corn that had previously gone down the sewer. Now remember, this is in 1944, and we are talking about this kind of internal control. Rudolph gave a paper on the recovery of yeast and how you would be able to stop pollution problems if you would look at by-product recovery.
