SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



Furfural is a chemical teaser. It jumped into the lime- 

 light during World War I, when it was hailed as a valu- 

 able waste that might be cheaply recovered from corn 

 cobs. It was also found in oat hulls, so Quaker Oats took 

 it up in deadly earnest as a salvage project. Furfural 

 dissolves a lot of tough customers like waxes, gums, and 

 resins. It is the starting point for preparing many chem- 

 icals and it makes some splendid plastics. But it never 

 crashed the commercial gate until a few years ago, when 

 the petroleum industry found it was good for purifying 

 lubricating oil. During the war, furfural in quantity 

 was wanted for synthetic rubber, and a big, new plant 

 was built near Memphis. Cottonseed hulls were com- 

 mandeered by the War Production Board to stretch the 

 supply of oat hulls. Patents that snarled up the furfural 

 plastics are beginning to expire, and twelve million by- 

 product pounds at Laurel, Mississippi, ought to start 

 something new in Southern industry. 



When pine-wood chips are dumped into the big 

 digesters at a kraft paper mill the fumes that rise from 

 this chemical cooking are loaded with turpentine. Two 

 to three gallons can be recovered for every cord of 

 wood, and with turpentine at eighty cents a pound, as it 

 was during the war, this waste recovery became exceed- 

 ingly attractive. If they did a thoroughgoing job, the 

 kraft mills could recover some twelve million gallons 

 of this sulfate turpentine. That is half a normal crop of 

 gum turpentine. 



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