Today’s generation have been taught to be wasteful. We produce enormous quantities of waste, then try to bury it or burn it and forget it. But it cannot be forgotten. It washes up on our beaches, it reappears as air pollution, it creeps into our water supply; it comes back to haunt us. A throw-away society is not a sustainable society. A garbage crisis is at hand. As a nation, we have begun to worry that the growing mounds of wastes will only continue to increase as the means of disposal become further restricted.
Government agencies and public officials are urgently trying to find a solution. The waste dilemma has become the centerpiece of the politics of garbage. The mood of the crisis manifests itself in countless ways, including attempts to export the problem, here or abroad. Numerous municipalities, counties, and states, particularly those with heavier concentrations of industry and greater urban density, have attempted to send their waste to less dense, often poorer areas. This has created a garbage war between states.
California seeks to dispose in Arizona, New York looks to Vermont, and Minnesota makes a move on Iowa. New Jersey, especially, has been an active exporter, probing the possibilities of dumping its waste in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. These states though constrained by the commerce clause of the Constitution, have nevertheless sought to pass legislation to halt New Jersey’s aggressive export policy. But it is the city of Philadelphia and the saga of its ash barge that provides perhaps the striking example of this form of garbage imperialism.
During the 1980s, Philadelphia sought to rely on incineration to reduce the amount of its municipal trash embarked for distant landfills. As a consequence, local officials were stuck with a new, and more difficult problem: how to dispose of the city’s incinerator-generated ash, particularly after residents sued to compel the city to remove thousands of tons of ash residue piled up near the city’s main incinerators. Some of the ash had been shipped to Virginia, Ohio and other states, but it was rejected because of local protests.
With its land-based disposal options under attack, the city finally arranged with two private companies to ship the ash abroad. A cargo ship named the Khian Sea traveled all around the world and not one country would let the ash be disposed of in their land. The ash barge after a long time voyage eventually dumped the ash in the Indian Ocean. The Philadelphia experience has become the rule rather than the exception in the costly and sometimes bizarre search to dump the trash.
Exporting scandals—in which incinerator ash or other wastes are either unloaded illegally or under questionable circumstances—have taken place in a number of African and Latin American countries, such as Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau, and even in England, which has become a haven for garbage, because of its relatively lax standards. The solid waste dilemma is not limited to the issue of garbage export. It ultimately raises questions about the source, volume, and nature of the wastes that are being generated.
Policy-makers have placed a special emphasis on disposal technologies as they seek a solution they hope will be sufficiently risk-free and cost-effective. Despite the enormous industrial changes of the early 1900s and the resulting growth and change in the waste stream, the garbage issue appeared to be under control. Solid waste management continued to be an exercise in developing new, more comprehensive disposal technologies, primarily land based. Land disposal offered a number of advantages.
The availability of cheap real estate at the outskirts of the growing cities and suburbs of the 1940s and 1950s allowed such methods to be developed at a relatively low cost. This abundant underdeveloped land also meant, it was assumed, that landfills could easily handle any increase in volume brought by a rapidly changing waste stream. By expanding landfill capacity, public officials assumed they could ignore waste generation issues. Expanding landfills became a yardstick of productivity. Most landfills in this period were little more than open pits.
By the end of the 1950s, policy makers began promoting a more refined, and presumably environmentally benign, method of disposal, the sanitary landfill. Though more complex and costly than the open pit, the economics of the sanitary landfill remained an attractive means to offset public discontent about the hazards of land disposal. If the landfill had triumphed as the dominant method of getting rid of trash, the sanitary landfill became in turn the symbol of the most technically advanced form of that method.
The sanitary landfill distinguished itself from the open dump primarily by its practice of covering the waste with “ a layer of earth at the conclusion of each day’s operation or at such more frequent intervals as may be necessary. ” Sanitary engineers emphasized during the 1950s and 1960s that the sanitary landfill was a method based on the principles of engineering capable of eliminating any nuisances (odor problems, for example) “or hazards to public health or safety,” as opposed to simply burying the wastes without any additional intervention.
Since the 1970s, the sanitary landfill remains the overwhelming disposal method of nearly every community. The conflicts over landfills are at their peak. Public officials have to concede that the days of land disposal are numbered. How to get rid of the garbage is a national dilemma. By transforming waste materials into useable resources, recycling provides a way to manage solid waste while reducing pollution, conserving energy, creating jobs and building more competitive manufacturing industries.
Like burying trash in landfills or burning it in incinerators, recycling also costs money. Assessing society’s interest in recycling requires a full appraisal of the environmental and economic benefits and costs of recycling, in comparison with the one-way consumption of resources and disposal of used products and packaging in landfills and incinerators. When all of these factors are taken into account, the overwhelming advantages of recycling are apparent.
Recycling cuts pollution and conserves natural resources. The greatest environmental benefits of recycling are related not to landfills, but to the conservation of energy and natural resources and the prevention of pollution in manufacturing that result from the use of recycled rather than virgin raw materials. Recovered materials have already been refined and processed once, so manufacturing the second time around is usually much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the first.
Detailed analysis shows that these environmental benefits of recycling far outweigh any additional environmental burdens resulting from the collection, processing and transport of recyclable materials in curbside recycling programs. Franklin Associates recently examined the lifecycle environmental impacts of recycling the aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspapers, tin-coated steel cans and plastic soda bottles and milk jugs collected in a typical residential curbside program.
Collecting, processing, transporting and manufacturing new products with recovered materials results in less release of air and water pollutants, and less solid waste, than does acquiring and using virgin raw materials in manufacturing. Moreover, releases from recycling were considerably lower than those from landfilling in all pollutant categories, and were lower than those from incineration in almost all categories. Recycling conserves energy. Much less energy is needed to make recycled materials into new products compared to beginning the process again with new, “virgin” raw materials.
By recycling a ton of materials in a typical curbside recycling program, at least $187 worth of electricity, petroleum, natural gas and coal are conserved, even after accounting for the energy used to collect and transport the materials. In other words, the energy conserved through recycling is about five times as valuable as the average cost of disposing of trash in landfills in the U. S. The net reduction in energy use due to recycling is thus estimated at 16. 8 million b. t. u. ‘s. Recycling programs that are sensibly designed and fully implemented can be cost-competitive with solid waste landfilling and incineration.
Many of the curbside recycling collection programs that have been quickly implemented in the last six years are more expensive than they need to be. Numerous techniques are now available to make curbside recycling more efficient, and are now being tested and implemented in communities across the country. Recycling avoids the costs of disposing of waste in landfills or solid waste incinerators. The costs of recycling are partially offset by avoided disposal fees and by revenues earned through the sales of materials. Disposal fees vary greatly between different regions, and markets for recyclable materials are now booming.
Of the roughly 40% of the U. S. population served by curbside recycling programs in 1993, almost two-thirds live in the Northeast, where disposal costs are high, or on the West Coast, which has moderate disposal costs and especially high prices for recyclable materials. Curbside recycling in these areas is a rational response to economic costs and opportunities. Richard Bishop Consultants conducted a detailed study of 12 curbside recycling programs and three intermediate processing facilities in New Jersey chosen to be representative of the state’s mix of programs.
The firm found costs in 1990 to be $124 per ton without revenues from the sales of materials and $115 per ton including revenues. The study estimated that improved collection, revenue enhancement, administrative refinements, and changes in strategy and program design could reduce overall costs by 41%. Recycling creates jobs and makes manufacturing industries more competitive. Recycling provides manufacturing industries with less expensive sources of raw materials, a long-term economic advantage that translates into value for consumers who spend less on products and packaging.
The industrial development effects of recycling are significant. For example, one recent study found that in ten northeastern states alone, recycling adds $7. 2 billion in value to recovered materials through processing and manufacturing activities. Approximately 103,000 people were employed in recycling processing and manufacturing jobs in this region in 1991, 2. 7% of the region’s total employment. By transforming materials that would otherwise be discarded as waste into positively valued commodities that are used in manufacturing, the industrial development effects of recycling can be significant.
Answer to “Can America Win its Battle with Garbage? ” America can win its battle with garbage. It takes an individual effort by every consumer. When you use less and reuse more, you’re helping the environment both “upstream” (when products are manufactured) and “downstream” (when they’re disposed of). By not creating waste–in the form of unnecessary products or packaging–we don’t just avoid having to send it to landfills or incinerators.
We also avoid having to expend the energy, consume the natural resources, and create the pollution that comes from manufacturing it in the first place. Waste is reduced when purchases of disposable and over-packaged items are reduced or when there is a reuse of what is already purchased. We can no longer just send our growing garbage pile to new technological shrines; we must, instead finally accept responsibility for the garbage crisis. And do something positive about it without hurting the environment any further.
