in large measure, by the oil burning and oil carrying vessels plying along 

 the coast or going to foreign ports. As a large percentage of these vessels 

 are carrying foreign flags, it was a question not only of national but of 

 international importance. It might be appropriate for this Society to 

 endorse the action of the Hoover conference, and for the commissioners to 

 urge their Senators and Representatives to push through Congress some 

 law sufficiently drastic to meet this particular condition. I believe that is 

 the only way to get the desired results. 



Mb. W. E. Barber, Madison, Wis. : Wisconsin is a manufacturing 

 State. Along the Fox and Wisconsin River valleys there are about 60 

 paper mills, together with other industrial plants in the different cities 

 located on those streams. I do not know how the Federal Government is 

 going to step into Wisconsin and tell the people there how to control the 

 industrial waste from the plants along those streams, as they are inland 

 waters. I am opposed to a centralized government at Washington coming 

 into our State and telling us what we are to do with our local institutions. 

 The question of the pollution of streams has been discussed for years at 

 meetings of this Society and perhaps some progress has been made. We 

 have accomplished something in Wisconsin, but it is a discouraging job. 

 The cities located along the streams welcomed every manufacturing plant 

 they could get ; they offered every inducement to locate in their communities 

 and employ their labor, and the plants were built without any attention 

 whatever to disposition of the waste. The paper mill waste is enormous, 

 but it can be controlled. The question is how to do it. We have visited 

 every paper mill in our State ; we have been to the pea-canning plants and 

 have laid plans before many of them. Some have cooperated and gone 

 ahead with certain improvements, but the great bulk of the waste matter 

 is still flowing into the streams, destroying fish life and polluting the 

 waters, making them unfit for domestic use. 



The only way to settle this is for the States to enact stringent legisla- 

 tion providing a heavy penalty for violation of that law, giving these in- 

 stitutions sufficient time to regulate their plants to take care of the waste, 

 and then enforce the law. Do you suppose that if it were known to the 

 paper mills of this country that they could make $50,000 by putting in a 

 machine costing $25,000 they would not do it? We all know that as a 

 business proposition they would accept and go ahead with any improve- 

 ment necessary to make their institution a better one ; but when it comes 

 to a matter of this sort, where the interests of the great mass of the people 

 are concerned, the institutions pay no attention until confronted with a real 

 law and prosecution thereunder. The Wisconsin Traction, Heat, Light and 

 Power Company, of Milwaukee, has a gas plant located at Appleton. They 

 were going to take out one of their old tanks which had been in use 40 

 years and never emptied. It held thousands of gallons and was practically 

 full of sediment and tar accumulations from the manufacture of gas. They 

 pumped one-half the contents into Fox River and it was not long until the 

 odor spread all over Appleton and people began to wonder what was the 

 matter. I went there immediately and looked over the situation. It was 

 stopped, of course, and the company hauled away the balance of the con- 

 tents of the tank as they should have done with all of it. We prosecuted 

 these people, but our maximum fine for such offenses is $100 and the 



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