Tomato and Pumpkin Wastes
Oral H. Hert
Student, Civil Engineering
Purdue University
In the summer of 1946 Mr. A. F. Dreyer, Secretary of the Indiana
Canners' Association, and some of his association members met in the
office of the sanitary engineer, B. A. Poole, to discuss the possibilities
and advisability of carrying on research work having to do with the
disposal of tomato-canning wastes. After a rather long discussion it was
agreed that Purdue should direct studies on the treatment of tomato-
canning wastes on a trickling filter. The original suggestion was that
it would be desirable to know whether the treatment of these wastes in
lagoons before application to a trickling filter was advisable. Only one
location was known which might make such an investigation possible.
This was at Greenfield, Indiana, but after an inspection of the layout at
Greenfield it seemed inadvisable to attempt such a study at that place.
The next proposition which seemed to have almost as much merit
from a sizable cannery which were discharged to a municipal sewage
was to make a study of the characteristics of tomato-canning wastes
system in a city where the city sewage was a relatively small proportion
of the total flow during the canning season.
An inspection of the layout at Ladoga showed that the sewage-treatment plant, of the trickling filter type, had been designed much larger
than the requirement for treating the municipal sewage. In fact, it
seemed reasonable to believe that the treatment plant might be considered
to be large enough to treat the entire flow from both the canning plant
and the city.
Contact was made with the city officials, with Mr. Cross, Superintendent of Sewage and Water Treatment, and with the Superintendent
of the Ladoga Canning Company, Mr. Faulkenberry, to obtain permission to take samples and to gather necessary information for determining
the degree of purification obtained at the sewage-treatment plant and
effects of the pretreatment of the canning wastes at the canning plant
itself. The studies were made from August 17 to October 4. This
period covered the entire canning season for tomatoes.
Upon completion of the tomato season, it was decided that studies
could well be made on the same canning plant and sewage plant during
the pumpkin-packing season.  The National Canners' Association volun-
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