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Show Keeping Up Science Service. WNU Service. Wood Products Are Assigned New Jobs, JA in the Industries K. J By WATSON DAVIS New York. Wood is just plain lumber, a building material, ma-terial, to most people, although al-though they have heard that both the paper upon which newspapers are printed and rayon underthings are made from wood. Utilization cf wood has many ramifications ram-ifications In modern industry today. But the editors of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering in a survey sur-vey discover that wood and its products prod-ucts will have many more uses in industry's tomorrow. Take the troublesome liquids that result from the sulphite pulping process, first step toward newsprint and rayon. Sulphite waste liquor contains lignin, partner to cellulose in wood. Chemists are looking for ; jobs for, lignin, confident that even tually it' will be found to be' as talented tal-ented chemically and industrially as ' cellulose. In Washington state the sulphite liquor is used instead of .f oil for dressing the dirt roads, sta- i bilizing the soil and giving a hard, dust-free crust There is also re- search looking towards its use as I ' fertilizer. I Gas From Wood Waste.' In Europe wood-working plants make gas from wood waste for pow- 1 er purposes and automobiles are J fueled by wood-producer gas, made as you ride, with 25 pounds of wood I the reported equivalent of a gallon ' of gasoline. Germany makes sugar actual, t sweet stuff and alcohol from wood !; by two different processes, but it is ) concluded that this would not be 5 ; done profitably in the United States. Then it is possible to squeeze ground sawdust and mill waste into hard dense products that are strong- er than the wood that nature made. V Inferior softwood lumber can be I pressed into hard, dense attractive V "hardwoods" and the lumber indus- try is looking into the commercial possibilities of this transformation. I Awake to the fact that they are I not limited to the form of wood as I produced by-the tree, useful as that I is, lumber companies are installing their own research staffs and scien- tists are now helping lumberjacks f and millhands in one of the oldest of American industries. |