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The Determination of the Type and Degree
of Treatment Required for An
Industrial Waste Problem
Philip F. Morgan
National Council for Stream Improvement
Kalamazoo, Michigan
The National Council for Stream Improvement established a laboratory at Kalamazoo in the latter part of 1945 for the purpose of continuing and expanding its investigations of methods for treating or
utilizing deinking waste so that the residual waste could be discharged
to the receiving streams without creating a serious pollution problem.
Deinking waste is the waste resulting from the conversion of old magazine, book, and ledger paper into pulp suitable for making new book
and magazine paper. The laboratory was established at Kalamazoo
because of the great concentration of deinking mills in the vicinity and
because of the serious pollution problem in the Kalamazoo River, which
receives the wastes from all these deinking mills.
The National Council's over-all program for the study of deinking
waste was planned to include (1) studies of all possible methods of
treatment so that deinking mills in various parts of the country could
select the most economical type of treatment for their particular requirements and (2) studies of the effect of deinking waste on streams
to make possible the prediction of degree of improvement of polluted
conditions obtainable in any given stream for the various methods of
waste treatment that could be used.
The laboratory at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research at
Pittsburgh, where the National Council began the deinking-waste project, initiated a series of studies to obtain data on the B.O.D. and solids
removals which could be obtained by plain sedimentation, chemical precipitation, and other methods of physical separation such as heat coagulation, centrifugal separation, and filtration.
The first project undertaken after the Kalamazoo laboratory was
started was a series of detailed studies of the deinking operation at several mills so that all possible methods of reducing or segregating the
waste could be considered. Biological treatment of the waste was
started when it was found that an exceptionally large proportion of
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