Sweet Smell Of Past Success -- Vanillin Era Over

When the wind was right, the smell of vanilla ice cream wafted tantalizingly from the chemical plant at 9229 E. Marginal Way S. to the big Kenworth Truck Co. next door.

That pleasantly sweet smell - from a chemical product called vanillin - also has meant jobs for skilled workers and money for the plant's owners: Monsanto Chemical, from 1949 to 1986, and since then, Rhone-Poulenc, France's largest chemical manufacturer.

Makers of candy bars, cake mixes and ice creams long have depended on vanillin for their artificial vanilla flavoring. And, since the mid-'70s, vanillin has been a key ingredient in two well-known drugs - L-dopa, which is used in the treatment of Parkinson's disease, and Aldomet, a trade name for a drug used to control high-blood pressure.

Despite the plant's success - it supplied 30 percent of the world's vanillin in 1988 and 20 percent in the past two years - it is due to close next week.

The product - derived from the liquor produced by pulp mills - still is in great demand. But environmental concerns have made it increasingly difficult to deal with hazardous wastes.

Rhone-Poulenc, which also manufactures vanillin synthetically in France, is moving its U.S. vanillin operation to Baton Rouge, La. That plant, too, will make the product synthetically, thus avoiding many of the waste-disposal problems inherent in Seattle's wood-based process.

Seventy workers will lose their jobs here.

Although all were given the option of moving to Louisiana, with all expenses paid, there were only 10 takers, says Gary Podrabsky, plant manager.

``Most of our workers have their roots here,'' says Podrabsky, who grew up in Everett and is a chemical-engineering graduate of Washington State University. ``Like me, they don't want to move.''

To cushion the blow, Rhone-Poulenc is paying employees an average of nine months severance pay and has hired a job-placement company.

In addition, Podrabsky himself has been on the telephone trying to interest business friends in what he calls ``a group of highly trained team players, capable of great productivity.''

``But,'' he says, ``some of those being laid off are just a few years from retirement. I really worry about them.''

The story of vanillin's rise and fall here is a fascinating chapter in the ongoing saga of chemists constantly at work developing new products and chemical engineers bringing their test-tube dreams to fruition.

Before World War II, the plant site was occupied by I.F. Laucks, a chemical testing laboratory.

During the war, it was taken over as an encampment for Italian POWs.

Post-war Monsanto bought the site, using the POW headquarters as an office in the beginning. While producing glues and resins for wood products, the company explored the feasibility of large-scale manufacture of vanillin, a product that requires a large supply of what Washington has always had in abundance - trees.

In the laboratory, with tiny test tubes, Monstanto's chemists could produce wonderful vanillin.

They took sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp and mixed it with sodium hydroxide, a caustic soda, then converted the liquor molecules into vanillin.

The challenge was to do it cheaply, efficiently and safely in the real world. Quite a few young chemical engineers, fresh from World War II and college on the GI Bill, were eager for the challenge.

Phil Sharpe, who designed the plant and was the project manager during startup, says all he had to do was take the original concept and patents and enlarge upon them - so the plant could handle a few million gallons of chemicals a year.

``We used to say, laughingly, that if we could ever get the Chinese to start eating a lot of ice cream, there would be an unlimited market for vanillin,'' says Sharpe.

Eric Denton, one of the young chemical engineers who helped build the plant and then ran it for several years, says: ``It is amazing that there were no serious accidents at the facility . . . in spite of handling huge quantities of concentrated acids and alkalis and . . . the use of very large amounts of volatile and toxic solvents.''

In the beginning, the plant turned out about three-quarters of a million pounds of vanillin annually, Denton says.

In the past few years, it has turned out nearly 10 times that amount, Podrabsky says.

The plant always has acquired its main ingredient, high-quality sulfite waste liquor - a thick blackish liquid - from Georgia Pacific (previously Puget Sound Pulp & Paper) in Bellingham.

Podrabsky, who says ``we've been recycling pulp-mill waste for 40 years,'' attributes the local plant's downfall to two things:

-- It takes 140 pounds of sulfite waste to produce one pound of vanillin, and 139 pounds of waste are left over. The waste usually is sold by the barge-load to kraft (sulfate) paper mills. But the market is not firm.

-- The cost of sodium hydroxide, the caustic that releases vanillin from sulfite liquor, has escalated dramatically in recent years. That's because of a chain reaction in the chemical business that really has little to do with vanillin. Chlorine, a byproduct of making sodium hydroxide, produces ``minuscule amounts of dioxin'' when it is used in bleaching pulp, one of its main uses. ``Because nobody wants to be connected with dioxin,'' says Podrabsky, ``the price of sodium hydroxide soars as pulp mills scramble to reduce the use of chlorine.''

The sign at the entrance to Rhone-Poulenc used to read: ``Safety is the catalyst for a healthy environment.''

It recently was changed to: ``Let's have a safe ending to a new beginning.''

Podrabsky said the plant will be dismantled and the site will be sold.