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Show DRIVE LAUNCHED 4 TO CONSERVE WASTE MATERIAL A three way drive to turn common com-mon waste materials of the Pacific coast and western states into valuable valu-able commercial products is being pressed this year by the U. S. Department De-partment of Agriculture in cooperation co-operation with leading industries and universities. Such familiar and hitherto worthless by-products as corn cobs, grain stalks and husks, chicken feathers and even the sumac plant are already finding wide usage in important industries, and the department's de-partment's western laboratory at Albany, California, will devote 1947 to exploring the commercial applications appli-cations of many others, including citrus fruits, alfalfa, and several varities of vegetables. Potentialities of the far-reaching research program are found, it was pointed out, in the uses now being made of corn cobs and sawdust by such companies as SKF Industries, Inc., which reports annual use of aproximately 48,000 pounds of ground cobs and 400 tons of sawdust saw-dust to burnish and clean ball and roller bearings. The University of Pennsylvania Medical School is experimenting with the lowly buckwheat plant, traditional griddle cake ingredient, to extract rutin needed for high blood pressure victims. Texas A. & M. College reports making a palatable poultry and hog feed from ground cotton seed hulls after the valuable oil has been extracted. ex-tracted. Cotton seed hulls, together togeth-er with peanut shells, are already providing synthetic motor fuel at the rate of 90 gallons to the ton. A strong synthetic fibre made from the 175,000,000 pounds of chicken feathers thrown away annually an-nually is the goal of other experts. ex-perts. To speed home building, such construction board manufacturers as Celotex Corp., Chicago, and Maizwood Insulating Co., Dubuque, are buying up straws, husks and stalks as raw materials. To increase the yield of penicillin, penicil-lin, chemists and scientists are feeding the drug-producing mold a $234,000 yearly diet of 6,000,000 lbs. of sugar obtained from milk. Three agriculture department research re-search stations are producing tannic tan-nic acid, essential for curing hides, from wild sumac leaves, while off-shaped off-shaped lemons, once discarded, are now producing profits in the form of lemon oil, citric acid and pectin. |