Section Ten
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
91    REMEMBRANCES OF THE PURDUE INDUSTRIAL WASTE
CONFERENCES
James E. Etzel, Professor Emeritus
School of Civil Engineering
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana 47907
1 usually introduce the keynote speaker, so I am not quite sure how to do this. 1 thought 1 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.
When I thought about keynote speakers, one of those 1 remember most, because he happened to be
a personal friend, was Paul McCracken. Paul was a professor of economics at the University of
Michigan, but he was famous for being the chairman of the Counsel of Economic Advisors to the
President of the United States. He gave us some words of wisdom when he said that "Twenty-five
percent of the budget of this country is discretionary; 75% is committed by law." When you stop and
think about what he was saying, it is clear that if we want to solve all these pollution problems and
other matters, we don't have the money to do it. If we want to do it, we either have to increase the
budget or we have to unenact some of the laws that commit us to spending 75% of our budget. When I
think of what Paul said, and then reflect on things that you read and things you say yourself, it is most
interesting that no country ever has a pollution problem until they have discretionary income. When
you are worried about feeding your people; when you are worried about the fact that your country is
45lh Purdue Industrial Waste Conference Proceedings, © 1991 Lewis Publishers, Inc., Chelsea, Michigan 48118.
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