SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



pany's current expenses go chiefly into taking out of 

 wood all of its constituents, excepting cellulose. In thus 

 turning lignocellulose into cellulose, the paper mill gets 

 from its paper-making machines only half the raw ma- 

 terial it started with. The other half is pure waste; not 

 only a loss, but a disposal problem. More than half of 

 this waste is lignin, which has thus achieved the un- 

 enviable position of the greatest waste in American 

 industry today; some two million tons a year. 



This mocking challenge to the ingenuity of our chem- 

 ists has not been dodged, but it has not been very suc- 

 cessfully met. Lignin itself is a baffling material, so com- 

 plex that even after years of study the exact formula 

 has never been determined. But the chemists do know 

 what happens when lignin is treated with many differ- 

 ent chemicals in a lot of different processes, and they 

 have proposed a multitude of uses for it. These run the 

 gamut from adhesives to water purifiers. Ten years ago, 

 a brilliant research team at the Rothschild paper mills, 

 headed by Allen Abrams, evolved a clever process for 

 making the flavoring substance, vanillin, out of lignin. 

 This is being done, but though the most widely used of 

 all flavors more of it goes into cigarettes than into ice 

 cream and candy combined vanillin manufacture bores 

 but a tiny hole in the mountain of lignin waste. 



One big wood industry has always used lignin. Mason- 

 ite, the hard, smooth building board, is manufactured 

 by a novel wood- working process. In this unique opera- 



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