MILK BY-PRODUCTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 December 1942, Page 4

MILK BY-PRODUCTS

REMARKABLE MODERN DEVELOPMENTS CASEIN PAINT AND OTHER MATERIALS. WIDE RANGE OF USES. Felt hats and ginger ale may at first blush seem to have little in common, but in this ingenious day and age they do have, It' 'is milk. Yes, there is a milk by-product that goes into each of them. Not only that, but milk produces ingredients that go into chicken feed, plastic dress ornaments, dyes, interior house paint, and many otherwise quite unrelated products. The research laboratories have really done a job with casein, lactose, lactic acid, and other derivatives of skim milk until one wonders what we ever did without them. No doubt the end of their inventiveness has not even yet been reached.

Perhaps the by-product most familiar to the general public is the casein paint recently put on the market. This miracle-stuff, as every faithful reader of the advertisements knows, goes on over wallpaper or any other wall-cov-ering with the greatest of ease. It doesn’t smell of turpentine, it dries rapidly, and, as the booklets tell you, “has uniform viscosity and remains stable in the can,over long periods of time.” Moreover, it is supposed to be particularly famous for its good clean pastel colours, including a white that will not turn yellow, and its ability to reflect an extraordinary amount’ of light. Lactose, on the other hand, has a more belligerent role for it can be used as a stabiliser for explosives and as a raw-material ingredient in plastics — all of which brings our hitherto innocuous friend, milk, into the limelight in a new guise, and makes it definitely a defense product. Milk and the 'brine that olives come in would seem to be as unlike as two things could possibly be, yet lactic acid forms the base not only of olive bj'ine but for the liquid around pickles and sauerkraut.

Skim rililk used to be a “surplus commodity”—many was the farmer who kept pigs in order to use up his left-over skim milk. But no longer can skim milk be considered “surplus.” • It is first soured —divided into curds and whey. The curds are known as casein; the whey contain the “lactates.” Casein has adhesive and wa-ter-resistant qualities that make it valuable for coating paper, for instance. It is one of the best possible agents for binding clay to paper stock and producing the smooth calendered paper used in magazines and booklets —especially booklets about the new uses of skim milk.

Out of casein, also, the chemists have learned to produce fine, curly fibres that blend beautifully with wool, mohair, cotton, rayon, or even fur. These have, for more than a year, been used widely in felt for hats, and in winter clothing, in blankets, and pillows, and upholstering. The threatened wool shortages gives this casein product a daily increasing importance. Only recently has research found wavs to produce the lactates economically, but it is now being done, and the derivatives of lactose, or milksugar, have an almost infinite variety of uses. They are used, for instance, in the plating of nickel on zinc, in the manufacture of baking powder, and as ■a general solvent and preservative. — Laura Haddock in the “Christian Science Monitor.”