The Luck of Bellingham

Hard-drinking U.S. synthetic rubber and smokeless powder plants, which in 1944 downed about 90% of the domestic sugar, grain and molasses alcohol supply, have been searching feverishly for more & more industrial alcohol spigots. Almost equally fervent has been the Pacific Northwest's hunt for new industries with postwar prom ise. Last week, in one happy stroke, the Government got its spigot and the North west its new industry.

The timely provider of both was sprawling Puget Sound Pulp & Timber Co., owner of the U.S.'s largest unbleached sulphite pulp mill at Bellingham, Wash., and first U.S. pulp mill in this war to manufacture alcohol from wood-pulp wastes.

P.S.P. & T., which expects soon to reach an annual production of 1,750,000 gallons, has already started diverting its sudsy, yellowish sulphite waste liquors through a six-story, million-dollar moonshiner's dream of a still (built and owned by the Defense Plant Corp.). Its obvious hurry to get into production has two prime causes, beyond Government needs: 1) so long as the war lasts, the Government will buy all of Puget Sound's output, but thereafter the mill will have to compete in a civilian market against the vast flow of more cheaply produced grain and molasses alcohol; 2) the ever-thirsty U.S. is rushing completion of a bigger, $2,000,000 alcohol plant for the potent Willamette Wood Chemical Co. of Springfield, Ore.

Officials of Puget Sound Pulp hope to learn and earn enough from their exciting war baby to buy it from DPC after the war. Progressive Bellinghamites, envisioning a plant that may turn out anything from hair tonic to gin, as waste-pulp possibilities are explored, feel the plant may be the luck of their one-industry town, and a white hope of the whole Northwest.

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