Responding industrial unit

The third report was an unequivocal vindication of Patterson s work lead exposure was recognized to be among industrialized society s most important environmental health problems. . . Science and society have been remarkably slow to recognize and respond. . . but that is changing. The Centers for Disease Control s acceptable concentration of lead in children s blood had dropped from 60 to 10 lead had been removed from gasoline in the United States and average blood levels had improved by more than 95 percent. 

These were the years when whatever could be made could be sold at a profit. The United States was involved in a world war followed by a postwar business boom and the Korean War. Then came 1958. The Korean War had been over for five years. The United States was in the midst of a major recession.. The chemical industry that previously could do no wrong found that all of a sudden its profits were declining rapidly. A blow to the pocketbook causes a speedy reaction. A couple of major chemical concerns responded by firing 10% of salaried employees. This was the end of an era. 

Part of the ability of industry to respond to information such as 8(e) notices has been the result of development of health and safety units throughout industry. While some companies have had identifiable safety departments for many years, in many companies today, the organizational chart shows a health and... 

American chemical engineers were not very well equipped to address such sudden problems in their industry. A. D. Little s formulation of unit operations, which appeared in 1915, could have but a limited impact on the growing organic industry because, in practice at least, it largely ignored purely chemical problems (23). In retrospect, this notion of unit operation appears as one which responded extremely well to the industrial demands of a rapidly disappearing past - namely those of a heavy chemical industry based on minerals and petroleum refining. 

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