The Romance of Modern Chemistry
Forfatter: James C. Phillip
År: 1912
Forlag: Seeley, Service & Co. Limited
Sted: London
Sider: 347
UDK: 540 Phi
A Description in non-technical Language of the diverse and wonderful ways in which chemical forces are at work and of their manifold application in modern life.
With 29 illustrations & 15 diagrams.
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CHAPTER XXIV
THE VALUE OF THE BY-PRODUCT
IT is perhaps difficult for the outsider to realise that
the manufacture of useful and valuable materials,
which has been rendered possible only by the advance
of chemical science, but which we now take so much
as a matter of course, has meant at the same time the
production of enormous quantities of rubbish. The
raw material which Nature supplies may contain only
a small proportion of the substance we wish to get
from it; the rest is so much refuse, and, unless we
can devise some way of using it, has to go on the dust-
heap. We extract the gold, and the dross is left.
Now rubbish-heaps there will be as long as the world
lasts, but provided that they are not a public nuisance,
and that they are kept out of our sight, we accept
them as a necessary evil. It will be readily admitted,
however, that a rubbish-heap which as late as 1888
covered 450 acres of ground, and was then receiving
a trifling daily addition of 1000 tons, is no ordinary
affair. This heap of alkali waste, about which we
shall have more to say later on, was at the same time
a public nuisance; the neighbourhood was, and still
is, pervaded by a most objectionable odour.
There are many other cases in which the waste pro-
ducts of a chemical industry, although less obnoxious
than alkali waste, accumulate at an altogether un-
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