OnceReadable Cellulose, Such As Newspapers, Is Being Turned into Sugar

By PATTI HAGANSEPT. 21, 1975 This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com. America is in no way so bountiful, and in no way prodigal, as in her wastes. Products are manufactured toward a single end, residues often ignored or sewered. Says E. R. Pariser, Senior Research Scientist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Nutrition and Food Science, materials are considered waste simply because they are not being utilized. He describes waste matter as an anthropocentric concept; waste is matter out of place. . . . One of the important general attributes of life is that it is wasteproducingparticularly American industrial life.For instance, each year in the United States, urban solid wastes alone, in the amount of 125 million tons, are gathered and thrown away. These wasted wastes are estimated in the Ford Foundation's Energy Conservation Papers contain, in part, some 800,000 tons of aluminum, 10.6 million tons of ferrous metals and 400,000 tons of nonferrous metals such as copper. In 1975, recovered and recycled, these wastes could amount to 400,000 tons of aluminum, 6.9 million tons of ferrous metals and 100,000 tons of copper.The possibilities for more subtle forms of waste recovery, at least experimentally, seem almost unlimited. The economics of many laboratory efforts have yet to be worked out, but as Alan Poole notes in the Energy Conservation Papers, regarding biogas it is only a matter of time until alternative sources of gas become competitive.Projects for converting the wasted to the used, at the same time helping out the Gross National Product, the National Ecology, the world food/energy shortage, range from:Turning the dung of the multifaceted cow into: methane gas, animal feed, fertilizer. American argriculture produces some 200 million tons of manure each year. (The protein in the American cow manure crop alone equals that of the United States soybean cropa major cattle feed.) Manure gassification could provide 10 to 15 per cent of total American energy requirements, according to Ralph Douglas, president of Era, Inc., in Lubbock, Texas. (Era and an Oklahoma company, Calorific Recovery Anerobic Process Inc., have signed agreements with Natural Gas Pipeline Co. of America to supply 1.2 billion cubic feet of biogas a year, once their planned gassification plants are constructed. That would warm 7,000 Chicago homes for a year. Era aims to sell its biogas for $1.30 per thousand cubic feet, competitive with intrastate prices for production and sale of natural gas, but not interstate, which is regulated at 51 cents.)AdvertisementCows can further rerecycle the residues left by the manure gassification processat about $44 per dry tonas a feed supplement. Residues can be sold for fertilizer.AdvertisementTurning the chitin (an inert polymer) from crustacean carcasses like shrimp, lobster and crab, into chitosan, a more active polymer that binds to and strengthens other chemical structures, by a simple, inexpensive chemical process. Chitosan is already sold in small amounts at $1$5 a pound by companies like Marine Commodities International though it is not yet used on a large scale industrially (largescale production would bring the price to around 50 cents a pound). E. R. Pariser estimates that the 700 million pounds of lobster, shrimp and crab landed in the United States each year (about half of it is processed unshelled) has a potential yearly yield of at least 26 million pounds of chitin, that could reduce to 21 million pounds of chitosan. Experiments carried out at the University of Washington with funding from the United States Department of Commerce's Sea Grant Program, show chitosan to be a raw material with a remarkable variety of uses: to improve the wet strength of wood products, as a woundhealing accelerator for medical use, to make membranesfor filters, sausage casings, photographic film, as a biodegradable food packaging material, as a coagulant in the treatment of domestic sewage (in use in Japan).From Sawdust to FoodTurning fish sawdust, as well as the bones and flesh from fish fillets, into processed food for human consumption. Eighty per cent of the fish consumed in the United States is in the form of fish fillets. Robert Gray, a chemist and president of the BioMarine Research Laboratories, Gloucester, Mass., estimates that of the 80 million pounds filleting fish landed in Gloucester in 1973, only 40 per cent in fact went into fillets, while 60 per centbones and flesh ended up in the rendering plant. Of the 60 per cent, some 30 million pounds could have been recovered by use mincing machines and engineered into foods such as fish sticks, fish cakes, reconstituted fish fillets. (Plans are underway to construct a pilot plant for largescale production such fish products.) About 6 per cent of Gloucester's import of frozen fish blocks362.5 million pounds yearlyis lost as fish sawdust when the blocks are sawed.Fisheries presently get rid of the sawdust as highprotein garbage, though it could amount to 20 million pounds dried protein product, salable to pet food industries at 30 cents a pound, or as a highprotein powder, for use a protein supplement in food for human consumption around 50 cents a pound, Thirty million pounds of this high protein sawdust were fed last year to pigs, and proved too rich for their tastes.Turning once readable cellulose, such as The New York Times, into food and into fuel. At Natick, Mass., United States Army researchers are raising microorganisms like Trichoderma viride on wood pulp. The microorganisms produce an enzyme called cellulase. After removal of the microorganism from a cellulasewater beer, powdered New York Times (or some other daily) is added. This unreadable brew produces glucose, which can then be metamorphosed into a food, such as sugary syrup, or more usefully, into ethyl alcohol (presently made from a petroleum product and used among other things as a fuel).The Army experiment, conducted by Leo A. Spano, a chemical engineer, turned up to 4,000 pounds of newspaper waste into 2,000 pounds of glucose each month. The glucose now costs between 10 and 15 cents a pound to produce, but scientists hope to reduce it to a penny a pound; a gallon of ethyl alcohol made from 12.8 pounds of glucose would cost only 38 cents. Gulf Oil Chemicals Company, a division of Gulf Oil Corporation, is building a pilot plant southeast Kansas that would process municipal trash (a ton of municipal trash yields 1,000 pounds of cellulosic waste, yields 500 pounds of glucose) to produce the glucose to produce the alcohol. The process is, in essence, a way of harnessing the solar energy stored in plants and trees, bypassing the millions of years it takes to make fossil fuels.A version of this archives appears in print on September 21, 1975, on Page E8 of the New York edition with the headline: . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe