Alkali Inspectors

Smoke and ash abatement in Great Britain was considered to be a health agency responsibility and was so confirmed by the first Public Health Act of 1848 and the later ones of 1866 and 1875. Air pollution from the emerging chemical industry was considered a separate matter and was made the responsibility of the Alkali Inspectorate created by the Alkali Act of 1863. 

In 1863, the British Parliament passed the Alkali Act, which forced the LeBlanc factories to reclaim 95 percent of the hydrochloric acid gas that they produced. Angus Smith, the Alkali Inspector assigned to enforce the law, demonstrated that industrial towns suffered from higher sulfate levels than did the countryside. When Angus Smith also coined the term acid rain, air pollution became a public issue. By the 1870s, Leblanc factories emitted less than 0.1 percent of the hydrochloric acid gas they produced the rest was reclaimed and sold. 

The Alkali Act of 1863 required that 95 per cent of the emissions of hydrogen chloride be abated and a national inspectorate was set up to enforce the legislation (NSCA, 1998). Later acts charged the inspectorate with the regulation of other types of industrial pollution, but it retained its name of The Alkali Inspectorate until 1983, when it became Her Majesty s Industrial Air Pollution Inspectorate (NSCA, 1998, p5). The approach of the Alkali Act, of allowing industry to cause pollution, but setting constraints and limits over how much pollution it can emit, has become the standard UK approach to pollution control. 

A hundred years ago George E. Davis was the Alkali Inspector for the Midland region of England. His function was to monitor the pollution coming not only from the alkali factories but also from the many other types of chemical plants in the region. He thus obtained access to a wide variety of chemical processes, incidentally forming in his mind the rudiments of modem Chemical Engineering education. 

Just over a year later he was invited by Dr. Angus Smith to join the Alkali Inspectorate formed to administer the new Alkali Act. This was the first legislation to try to control environmental pollution. Dr. Smith... 

Smith, Robert Angus (1817-1884) Scottish chemist, who investigated numerous environmental issues he became in 1863 Queen Victoria s first alkali inspector Alkali Acts Administration, setting limits for HCl emission by alkali plants). 

It is of interest to note that during 1976 the arithmetic mean lead content of lead works emissions examined by HM Alkali Inspectorate was 0.011 g mT. It was also noted in the report of the Inspectorate [7] that at the Avonmouth primary lead-zinc-cadmium smelter of Commonwealth Smelting Ltd. (with a capacity of 40 000 tonne of lead annually), emission of lead was about 4 kg h in 1976, compared with a consent limit of 5.4 kg h . ... 

Health and Safety Commission, Report of HM Alkali Inspectorate (1976), Industrial Air Pollution, HMSO. 

Outside the manufacturing chemical community, public officials and medical men were at this date begioning to seriously address the issue of chemical pollution and health. Mortality data systematically collected by central government was carefully examined, but like the anecdotal medical opinion of earlier disputes, the figures failed to produce a solution to the controversy. The Alkali Inspector, Angus Smith, seems anodyne in his conclusions regarding the effect of chemical gases on public health in 1873-4 ... 

Other trades, with the exception of the manure manufacturers, strongly opposed moves by government to extend inspection to their operations. In the event, the 1881 Act brought many other chemical trades under the jurisdiction of the Alkali Inspectorate sulphuric acid works, chemical manure works, gas liquor works, nitric acid works, sulphate of ammonia works, chlorine works, salt works and cement works. By 1890 the number of works included under the Act in Britain and Ireland totalled 1,034 of which only 13 per cent were alkali works. ... 

The alkali trade also fully agreed with the Alkali Inspector, Alfred Betcher, when he suggested in 1892 that the principle of legislation under the Alkah Acts should change from the control of particular manufacturing processes, to the control of scheduled gases, however they were produced. Eustace Carey spoke... 

The manner in which the Alkali Administration evolved is attributable to Smith s imagination, leadership and deep conviction about the role of the civil scientist rather than to any political creed. Smith s approach to sanitary legislation and its enforcement incorporated principles that have been carried through to form the basis of the present Alkali Inspectorate within the Health and Safety Executive. 

The requirements of the Alkali Acts of 1863 and 1874 (which implied the monitoring and control of gas emissions) are the most sharply focused of possible reasons for the employment of trained men. The public officials responsible for the implementation of the Acts, the Alkali Inspectors, in their reports, related the growth of laboratories to the Acts, though they did not claim that the laboratories establishment was simply a consequence of the Acts existence.While this offers a kind of explanation, it might be asked, how did it come about that the legal framework was predicated on the categories of analytical chemistry The public character of science will probably form part of any answer, but Sarah Wilmot s paper in this volume, with its emphasis on manufacturers and academics interest... 

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