Week's Watch

The President had good reason to feel optimistic about industry's antipollution efforts last week as he stood on the White House lawn watching two TWA jets take off from Washington National Airport. As a Chicago-bound 727 soared over the Potomac, the ship's Pratt & Whitney engines gushed black smoke, smearing the blue sky like a grease pencil. Two minutes later an Indianapolis-bound 727 with the same type of engines followed suit--but without trailing any visible wake. "That's quite a difference," Nixon beamed to TWA Chairman Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. standing beside him. "That's very good."

Tillinghast staged the demonstration to show the industry's progress in curbing air pollution by modifying jet-engine combustion chambers to burn a leaner fuel on takeoff. This eliminates smoke, though not invisible gases like carbon monoxide. TWA is spending $2,000,000 to alter its engines this way; all U.S. airlines are pledged to achieve smokeless takeoffs by 1973, which may cost the lines as much as $100 million.

Along with cleaner skies, the troubled industry has an added incentive: the new jet burners are far more efficient than polluting models, thus cutting fuel costs.

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It had to happen: a fratricidal war between the makers of washable and disposable diapers. Seizing the environmental initiative, the powerful Diaper Service Industry Association will spend more than a million dollars this year on ads aimed mainly at Procter & Gamble's throwaway Pampers, which enjoyed a lion's share of the estimated $200 million market last year. "If you were a baby," goes one sample ad, "what would you want to wear--soft, cuddly cotton or stiff and sticky plastic and paper?" The pitch stresses that cloth diapers, unlike disposables, are reusable, a point bolstered by New York City hospitals, which complain that the disposal of plastic-lined diapers--either by burning or dumping--adds to the city's pollution. All this may seem regressive to young mothers who hate washing cloth diapers and love the new disposables. But for those who worry about pollution, Procter & Gamble is playing both sides of the issue. The company also makes Ivory Snow--the perfect product, it says, to scrub cuddly cotton diapers.

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