Chemical vanilla
Coal tar, paper mill effluent, what else
What we know as vanilla, the queen of spice, is not vanilla. It smells like it (somewhat). It can even look like it. But it is not the real thing, which has aromatic compounds that touch your senses. Instead, what we have in our food, in our beverages, in our cosmetics and fragrances, is a synthetic extract, which has copied the smell of vanilla and captured it in a bottle.
This smell has been harvested from, believe it or not, effluent waste of a paper mill or coal tar components used in petrochemical plants. Artificial vanillin was first synthesised in 1874 in Germany when scientists successfully replicated the chemical signature of vanillin (3-methoxy-4-hydroxy-benzaldehyde). In 1890, French chemists created vanillin from eugenol found in clove. Eugenol was the main source of vanillin till the 1920s. In the early 1900s, came the discovery of vanilla from paper mill waste.br>
In 1922, the Ontario Paper Company in Canada had no way to dispose off huge amounts of sulphite liquor laced with lignin, which was polluting nearby streams. Chemists found that this waste had something that smelled like vanilla and a counterfeit was born. Lignin, which binds together the fibres in wood, is the waste product in the process of paper making. To remove lignin from fibre, paper companies