The soap and detergent industry produces relatively small volumes of liquid wastes directly, but causes great

public concern when its products are discharged afternts are use in homes and factories. In soap manufacturing, the waste waters discharge into trap tanks on skimming basins,where floatable fatty acids are recovered.the recovered fatty acids may not only pay all costs of operation,but also amortize the treatment-plant investment. Gibbs succesfully treated soapplant wastes by flotation with fine air bubbies for a retention period of 40 minutes.the floated sludge was skimmed into a receiving tnak,from which it was periodically pumped back to the soap factory for resprocessing or recovery. Detergents are a class of surface-active compounds used as cleansing agents.they can be grouped as anionic,and nonionic agents.the synthetic detergents are effective in wide ph ranges and do not soaps do.use of synthetic organic detergents in place of,and in addition to,soap has increased at a rapid rate,the production in the United states growing from about 28 million pounds in 1955.these synthetic compounds are used not only in households.but also increasingly in the textile,cosmetic,pharmaceutical,metal,paint,leather,paper and rubber industries,because of their properties of dispersing,wetting,and emulsifying, Many difficulties are reportedly being caused by these residual,water-solubie detergents,such asinterference with oxygen transfer in activated-sludge treatment and receiving streams ,excessive frothing,toxicity to fresh-water game fish,and difficulty of removal at watertreatment plants. The main concern of the public appears to be the presence of these compounds in water supplies,which implies not only that w emay be forced to drink a small amount of detergent in our water,but also that other pollution.of a more dangerous type,could conceivably find its way into the water supply. Bogan found that,although all detergents decompose somewhat by biological attack,the rate of decomposition is related to chemical structure. Branching in the alkyl group of the alkyl-aryl detergent types causes a definete retarding of oxidation of the alkyl-benzene-sulfonate detergents. Susceptibility of a nonionic substance to biochemical oxidation,other things being equal,decreases as the size of the polyoxyethylene hydrophilic group increases. Research is currently being carried out on the replacement of polifosfats in detergents with organic acids to reduce the algae problem. Studies have shown that both alkyl-benzenesulfonate and linear alkyl-sulfate can be removed by percolation trough sand-silt-type soils