Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 5
Smoke-consuming device. (
The American City,
February 1914)
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The apparatus shown in
figure 5 was a typical end-of-pipe solution to pollution that involved a flue
system that blew the cinders in a factory's smoke into the water at the bot-
tom of the device before the smoke left the stack.
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Figure 6, which is from
an article on smoke abatement, depicts a factory before and after the instal-
lation of a smoke-consuming device. People have always loved before-and-
after pictures.This one was published to give visible proof to doubters that
it was technically feasible to install smoke-abatement equipment in a fac-
tory that clearly eliminated its visible black smoke.
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Engineers also devised technologies for controlling some forms of indus-
trial water pollution.The earliest water pollution control technologies were
simple screens and weirs for trapping large sized particles of waste at the
point at which factory effluents were discharged into streams and other
waterways. Over time, industrial and sanitary engineers invented increas-
ingly elaborate methods for treating industrial water pollution.These tech-
nologies were especially important at some of the big chemical companies,
like Dow Chemical, that discharged huge quantities of waste into water-
courses. In the 1940s, for example, Dow's huge chemical plant in Midland,
Michigan manufactured more than 400 different chemicals, requiring the
daily disposal of some 200 million gallons of waste water, 70 tons of refuse,
