over 60 percent of aluminum, we recycle today only 1 percent of our plastics. We can do better. Which brings us to the subject of today's hearings.

What's the best way to achieve higher recycling rates? The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Amendments of 1991 include a number of incentives. The bill sets a national goal of 25 percent recycling by 1995, 50 percent by the turn of the century. But overall goals alone are not enough. If we are to make recycling a permanent fixture in American society, our national policy must include three basic elements:

First, we need to have an adequate supply of recyclable materials. Curbside and other community collection programs are springing up all over America. Some 2,700 municipalities serving 87 million Americans now have such programs. Today we will hear from officials in States and communities in the forefront in the recycling area. I look forward to asking them what we should do to help ensure that these programs continue and work better.

Second, we need to ensure that there is somebody who is willing to buy the recyclable materials being collected in these community programs. We need to ensure that, once collected, recyclable materials won't simply pile up but will be purchased and used or reused as useful new products. We look forward to hearing from some witnesses this morning and their views on whether the commodity— specifically, recycling commodity-requirements in this bill will help ensure market demand.

Finally, to ensure that recycling is a national phenomenon and not just an urban fad, we need to include rural America in our recycling efforts.

It is not just a question of whether to act, but rather how to act. S. 976 takes one approach. If there are other alternatives that are more viable, we will certainly consider them and, if they are better, certainly include them.

Now, to explore all of these questions during this hearing as well as subsequent hearings, I thank our witnesses for coming this morning and sharing their expertise with us. I look forward to working with all of you and others as we try to get this bill enacted.

I now turn to the ranking member of the committee, Senator Chafee.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN H. CHAFEE, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND

Senator CHAFEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, I want to thank you very much for the energy and enthusiasm and direction that you've given to this reauthorization of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. I think it is important for us to remember what we're talking about. We, in this city, all too often get bogged down into acronyms-RCRA, we call it. People don't really know what it means. They know it has something to do with conservation. But if I could repeat again what RCRA stands for-Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

As you stated, today, we're going to concentrate on the recycling of municipal solid waste.

The last significant revision to this Resource Conservation Recovery Act, which I will in the future refer to as RCRA, was in 1984, some seven years ago. Those amendments were designed to ensure that hazardous wastes were managed in an environmentally sound manner and we succeeded in that. Of course, the objective was to prevent the creation of any more Superfund sites, so we dealt with the hazardous wastes and those amendments I believe were successful.

Now, we are going to deal with solid wastes, nonhazardous waste the materials that are thrown away by households, merchants, government institutions. The last time we reauthorized RCRA, the theme was safe disposal of, as I say, industrial hazardous waste. Now we're concentrating on not only waste, but reduction-trying not to create the waste to start with-to encourage the recycling of both industrial waste and disposable household items.

A major part to the solution to the waste crisis lies, as I say, in reducing the amount of garbage we produce in the first place. This legislation attempts to deal with that.

We also have the objectives, as you pointed out, of a 25 percent recycling of municipal solid waste by the year 1995, and a 50 percent recycle by the year 2000. Now those are ambitious goals; we recognize that. They are goals but, nonetheless, I think we ought to strive to achieve them. And the Federal Government has an important role to play in this because the Federal Government is a major purchaser of goods in the United States and, obviously, how we do our purchasing and what we do with our trash affects the recycling roles to a great degree.

Mr. Chairman, I particularly want to welcome here one of our witnesses, Director Louise Durfee of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. She is a former president of one of our town councils in our State-we have 39 cities and towns. Ms. Durfee was president of the Tividen Town Council, so she has had political experience. She was president of Save the Bay, our most influential environmental organization, and gave great leadership to that group. So she will provide excellent testimony, and I look forward to productive hearing.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator BAUCUS. Thank you very much, Senator.

According to our "early bird" rule, the next is Senator Durenberger.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. DAVE DURENBERGER, U.S.

SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF MINNESOTA

Senator DURENBERGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am always mindful, at a time like this, of the time that my five-year-old son lectured me at the dinner table-this was 23 years ago now-about tossing paper wrappers out of my car. I think that's probably the first time that I thought of it in the sense of my personal responsibility for waste disposal and I've never forgotten it.

Also, as I look around this room today, I am struck by the fact that not since we had one of those famous Pat Moynihan infra

structure hearings have I not seen anyone older than I in the room. This is not like the highway bill where everyone is older than I am.

[Laughter.]

It strikes me that as we begin this very difficult discussion, we really are talking about serious generational issues. By the same token, it is terribly important, at least it is for me, to try to figure out what it is we're talking about. I must confess right off the bat to some ambivalence on the subject of solid waste recycling. I know I want to be enthusiastic about it. It is a subject of great enthusiasm in my State. You just mention the word "recycling" and everybody rushes out to the curb or puts up a sign somewhere to get every one to join in.

[Laughter.]

Certainly, in my State of Minnesota, if there is a way to do reduction, if there is a way to do recycling, if there is a way to do waste treatment or disposal, we've come up with it in one way or another. So I want to be enthusiastic about the recycling.

But it is also a cause for some innovative thinking and action by all of us, and that is particularly true of the counties in my State, that's true of the cities in my State; everybody is trying to think creatively about this. It is something that Government and citizens must do together to solve what we all perceive is a serious problem. And it occurs to me that when we are asked to do something as citizens other than pay taxes or vote for politicians that we don't like, but to solve a public problem, that kind of touches a public nerve and it contributes a lot to the support for recycling. So I want to be for recycling.

And I know my mantra-it is "reduce, recycle, treat, and dispose." But it seems to me that a successful public policy has to be based on more than good will. The question is, Why should we recycle a glass bottle, why should we recycle a newspaper, why should we recycle a tin can? How many of them should we recycle? How can we be sure that the number that we separate and collect is the same number we require to be reused in the new products? So more than good will and idealistic hierarchies are needed to answer these questions and the answers are not likely to be the same for every part of the waste stream, nor are they likely to be the same in every community in America because they are economic questions; they are local questions; and, in America, they are questions best answered by decentralized markets.

The aluminum can is the best evidence of the point that I am trying to make. Government does not need to force the recycling of aluminum cans. There is a market there which already supports the collection and the reuse of aluminum cans at a relatively high level. So no intervention is necessary. The only important sense in which glass bottles or plastic containers or tin cans are different from aluminum is the value of the raw material. I don't believe glass bottles are inherently more threatening to the environment. Tin cans don't take up a lot more space in the landfill. And plastic containers are not more difficult to collect. They are just worth less in each case so we collect fewer of them under our current system. Now we can insist that more glass bottles and tin cans and plastic containers be collected by Government regulation. If we've got

the votes, we can require that the recycling rate be just the same as it is for aluminum cans in an unregulated market. But if we do that, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay more than they are willing to pay to reuse those resources today. Maybe it is the local or State Government forced to subsidize recycling programs. Maybe it is the Government agencies procuring goods made from recyclable materials. Maybe it is households paying for the extra curbside pickup every month. Maybe it is the consumer paying more for a bottle of soda. But accomplish this change, someone will have to pay more than they are willing to pay today. And why are we asking them to pay more? Because glass bottles threaten human health and the environment? I doubt it.

In the case of most of the used materials that are targets for recycling, there are no large environmental externalities that need to be corrected by Federal regulation. There are some, like batteries, tires, used oil, where a really good case for environmental regulation could be made. But a lead acid car battery is not in the same category with the Sunday newspaper or a soup can when it comes to environmental impact.

Some will say we should expect to pay more because of the landfill crisis. And there is a crisis in some places and that has stimulated the local interest in recycling. Passing recycling ordinances is a lot more popular than granting permits for landfills or incinerators. But we should not take a landfill crisis of New Jersey or in rural Minnesota or in New York or in Connecticut as a sufficient foundation for a 50 percent recycling rate in Montana or in Arizona or in Mississippi.

People sometimes list other justification for it-the energy crisis, resource conservation. But there is no evidence to suggest that those factors are not already reflected in the prices that resource markets are willing to pay for recovered material. Maybe to illustrate that we could look again at the aluminum can.

So I think recycling is great, Mr. Chairman, and I think you are, too.

[Laughter.]

Senator CHAFEE. He hasn't been recycled-[Laughter.]

Senator DURENBERGER. And I really applaud you for getting that first bill in and laying the foundation for all of these hearings. I do, I think it is great. And I think we should pursue just as much of it as makes for good economics. We should certainly remove any barriers that exist. We should assist communities that face a landfill crisis in finding outlets for collected material. But let's think twice before we decide to impose their economics on everybody else. If we try, we'll find that precious Government resources or household incomes or the incomes of future generations are committed to objectives that can't be sustained over the long term.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator BAUCUs. Thank you very much, Senator.
Senator LIEBERMAN.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding these hearings on recycling and thank you for joining with Senators Burdick and Chafee in introducing this legislation to get the ball rolling on RCRA. It also really takes an historic step in getting the Federal Government into a leadership role on the whole question of recycling.

Obviously, we have become an extremely wasteful society. The measurements of that waste are themselves in numerous supply. We throw out twice as much garbage as we did in 1965, enough to top off more than 63,000 garbage trucks every day. One of my favorite measurements of our waste is that each American could fill the Statue of Liberty with the waste that we generate every five years, individually, every single American.

Towns and cities across the country are running out of landfill space. It seems to me that what is happening here is that we have this ever growing mound of garbage which we have been arguing over for years about whether we should bury or burn. We're running out of places to bury it; we understand that burning it is not the complete answer.

Finally, we're looking at ways to make the piles smaller than it has been by recycling.

I think that the American people understand that it is not just a matter of space but that it is a matter of pollution as well. To paraphrase the old adage, we should be saying now, "Waste not, pollute not" because we don't recycle as much as we should. We do destroy too many trees. We pollute too much air. We poison too much water. We degrade too much of our land. And we threaten the beauty of America as well as the quality of our own lives and our children's lives after us.

The hopeful note here is that unlike so many aspects of environmental pollution and protection, the answer to the garbage problem and the recycling problem lies within the capability of individuals to do something about. There is a general conservationist ethic I think in this country, an instinct to conserve resources, as well as an understanding in the public that really may be more advanced than among the politicians that we've got to change the way we're living or this planet is not going to be the healthful, safe, and beautiful place it has been and we want it to continue to be. I think it is that sense that individuals and individual institutions can do something about the garbage problem, about recycling that has generated this enormous movement in this direction across the country.

Now comes the time for the Federal Government to try to enter the scene in a positive way to set some goals, as this bill does, for recycling at the State and, inferentially, at the local level; to use our power as purchasers to affect markets; to use our power perhaps even with taxation to make sure that there is not only a supply of recycled material but that there is a demand and a capability to handle the supply that does exist. All of that and much more is part of what is on the line in the legislation that has been introduced. In the long run, our environment and our economy will be much better off if we make recycling a fact of our daily life at