AIRCRAFT STRIKES

A survey, conducted by EPA, for the Inter-Agency Bird Hazard Committee, on land disposal sites near airports reporting bird/aircraft hazards reported the following:

1. Solid waste disposal sites around airports which attract birds contribute to potential bird/aircraft collisions.

2. The majority of the land disposal sites inspected during the survey were open dunps, which not only contribute to the bird/aircraft hazard but are also sources of environmental pollution. Many of these sites were in violation of State and local regulation.

3. Closing all existing disposal sites around airports will reduce the risk of bird/aircraft collisions at the airports.

4. The Federal government and a land disposal site owner could be liable for bird-aircraft collision if the site is known to contribute to the bird hazard.

Among the 2,196 strikes reported during the period April 1961 through June 1967, several resulted in the loss of human life and extensive aircraft damage:

(a) Boston, Mass., 1960, flock of starlings contributed to an engine power failure of an Electra aircraft resulting in the loss of the aircraft and 62 lives.

(b) Ellicott City, Md. 1962. Strike by a whistling swan caused the loss of an aircraft and 17 lives. (Land Disposal Sites Near Airports Reporting Bird/Aircraft Hazards, EPA, Division of Technical Operations. Open-File Report TSR1.C.004/o, 1971.)

The Department of the Interior studies and surveys showed that "garbage dumps" located near airports are major attractors of sea gulls, the most common bird species involved in aircraft strikes. (SDS Report No. RD-68-62, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, 1968.)

GROUNDWATER POLLUTION

New Castle County, Delaware will be required to pay at least $2.2 million in FY 74 and possibly millions more in the future in order to stop the pollution of an aquifer underlying an old county landfill. Thus far, the leachate from the landfill has despoiled the water supply of approximately 40,000 homes and threatens larger supplies. (State News, Dover, Delaware, June 3, 1973, p. 3.)

The available information concerning the effects of solid waste fills in the quality of the adjacent groundwater has been organized and reviewed by a research contractor for the California State Water Pollution Control Board. CSWPCB Pub. No. 24 Calif. State Printing Office, Sacramento, Calif. This was done because the drinking water supply of a major city was becoming objectionable.

FOOD CONTAMINATION

Municipal dump was operated in such a way as to result in massive rat infestation of a farmer's farm causing disease in his dairy herd, a high bacteria count in the milk produced and actual damage to farm

buildings and harvested crops. (Bloss v. Village of Canastota, 35 Misc. 2d 829, 232 NYS 2d 1CC (1962).)

FIRE HAZARDS

Annual reports of the District of Columbia Fire Department for the last five years indicate that out of the total number of fires reported, solid waste was a major cause or contributing factor in 47-50 percent of the cases.

According to the New York City Fire Department Annual Statistics, rubbish-related structural fires represented 29 percent of the total in Manhattan in 1972; in the Bronx, 35 percent; total for New York City, 30 percent.

According to the National Commission on Fire Protection and Control, about $2.5 billion is spent annually in firefighting budgets and $2.7 billion in direct property losses. Fires result in about 12,000 deaths annually.

11. Report of the Solid Waste Management Advisory Group, “Opportunities for Improving Productivity in Solid Waste Collection" (Sept. 1973), pp. 1-6, 12-13, 31-32, 65:

CHAPTER I. THE POTENTIAL FOR PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT

Each year Americans discard between four and five billion tons of solid waste-that is, of material that is no longer useful in residences, stores, factories, farms, mines and to the people who generate it. Some of this residue becomes a resource for the secondary materials industry. However, the bulk of solid waste must be collected hauled away, treated, and disposed of.

In 1970-71 local solid waste management in the United Statesboth public and private-cost more than $3 billion. The industry employed about 227,000 people; 100,000 in residential collection, 70,000 in commercial collection, and 57,000 in disposal. As the volume of solid waste collected increases, as service areas expand, and as costs increase, the challenge of providing high-quality service to an increasingly quality-conscious public will also grow.

How can local governments meet these growing demands for both more and better service without further burdening the public treasury? The answer is to increase the productivity of solid waste management operations.

COMMUNITY AND NATIONWIDE POTENTIAL

What would productivity improvement in residential solid waste collection mean for local communities and for the country as a whole? Recent experience suggests that through the application of tried and proven analytical techniques and operational practices, most collection operations could increase their productivity by 20 percent.2 This

1 Not including employment in the secondary materials industry.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency demonstrations in several cities have shown that reductions in number of collection crews (through better routing) as well as in crew sizes are feasible. There is no reason to believe that these experiences are atypical. Work force reductions of 50 and 75 percent were achieved in the examples cited on pages which follow. Cuts in crew size from 4 to 3 men represent a 25 percent reduction; from 3 to 2. a 33 percent reduction, and from 2 to 1, a 50 percent reduction. An estimate of a possible 20 percent reduction nationwide is probably conservative.

could be achieved by reducing the residential collection work force through modernizing practices and equipment, attrition and interdepartmental transfers and job enlargement. Some of those savings should return to collection personnel in higher compensation, increased fringe benefits, or improved working conditions. And some could be diverted to lowering taxes or service fees to customers, resolving environmental problems in processing and disposal of solid wastes, freeing funds for other municipal services, and/or expanding and improving solid waste service.

Naturally, the potential productivity improvement for any given system depends upon the current state of operations and the skill and commitment of management in attempts to improve. But to date, there is no system familiar to the Advisory Group that has not been able to improve its productivity once the decision has been made to do so.

3

In national terms, a 20 percent productivity improvement in residential collection alone would represent significant gains. As indicated in the preface, collection consumes about 80 percent, or $2.4 billion, of solid waste costs. About 58 percent of those costs, or $1.4 billion, go for residential collection. And about 70 percent of residential collection costs cover personnel compensation, amounting to about $980 million. Consequently, a productivity improvement of 20 percent would produce close to $200 million in savings or expanded and improved service.

Another indication of the potential for increasing productivity is the success many communities have already had in improving their systems, a great number of which have taken advantage of the technical assistance offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Solid Waste Management Programs (EPA-OSWMP):

By the time the Parris Island Navy depot implements all recommendations for improving its collection and disposal system, annual expenditures will be cut by 40 percent. Furthermore, the practice of dumping into the sea has been eliminated with the substitution of landfill approved by the State as environmentally acceptable.

Little Rock, Arkansas, anticipates an annual saving of $200,000 in return for a one-time $18,000 outlay for technical assistance, and East Peoria, Illinois, expects to save $64,000 a year as a return for the $10,255 spent for technical help.

And perhaps the most dramatic example of productive change in collection occurred through the regional system of the fourteen jurisdictions which make up the Southeast Oakland County (Michigan) Incinerator Authority (SOCIA). The members of SOCIA reduced average collection costs by 16 percent (from 31 cents per household per service to 26 cents) within a recent sixmonth period. They also renegotiated their five private sector contracts at the same rate (which had previously increased each time), with further improvements continually being made. Other examples of successful productivity improvement are cited throughout this report. In each of these cases, individual communities

Even though the average residence produces only 16 pounds of solid waste per day as compared with the average commercial establishment's 203 pounds per day and the average industrial customer's 1,197 pounds per day, advances in containerization make commercial and industrial collection more manageable.

were both sufficiently aware that something was wrong and desirous for improvement to request technical assistance to identify and solve problems. And while some communities have been able to build upon similar experiences to make changes themselves without outside help, too many others are still functioning with inadequate or inappropriate methods of solid waste collection, and consequently are far below their productivity potential.

Countless communities sense they have problems but are unable to identify them specifically because they have not applied managerial resources; because they have not gathered operational data; because their cost accounting is weak or nonexistent. Many small private firms continue to compete for customers on the same street leading to duplication and inefficiencies.

În short, it is obvious there is high potential for productivity improvement.

The Cleveland experience has been publicized by some as a major productivity breakthrough in solid waste management. The city's solid waste operating budget for 1970 was $14.8 million; by 1972 this was dramatically cut by $6.3 million to a new level of $8.5 million. The collection work force of 1,400 (which was excessive by any measure for the amount of service being rendered at the time) was pared to 750, or a reduction of 650. The number of routes were sliced from 224 to 138, with the result that 86 fewer trucks were needed to haul the city's trash.

By some perceptions, these changes represented increased productivity. However, while money was saved, the level of service also decreased. Citizens must now carry their trash to the curb, whereas before it was collected from backyards. In addition, the sanitationmen's union claims that Cleveland has become a dirtier city-a claim with which some would agree and others would disagree, and that may stem naturally from labor's reaction to the drastic cut in the work force.

In reality, the change has most likely represented a partial productivity improvement and a partial service cut. The productivity improvement results from observations that while service has been reduced, the lower level of service seems to be provided relatively more efficiently than the former higher level.

It is also possible that some social costs were exacted for dollar savings. Cleveland's formerly inflated collection work force represented a kind of income-maintenance or employment-subsidy program for several hundred unskilled workers. It could, of course, be argued that hiring more trash collectors than a city needs is a poor way of creating jobs, particularly in view of the high accident rate for residential solid waste collectors. But the reality is that many of those 650 men who were laid off are still costing the city, but in less socially acceptable ways-less acceptable to the men themselves and to society as a wholefor they have transferred from the city's employment rolls to its welfare rolls.

Such factors must be weighed in considering major changes in solid waste operations.

MANPOWER MANAGEMENT AND LABOR RELATIONS

In an industry as labor-intensives as solid waste management, a key to productivity is management's ability to lead and work with employees. And yet, many departments are experiencing high turnover rates and changing attitudes toward manual work along with other problems which in too many instances produce a negative attitude on management's part toward labor in general.

However, there is sufficient experience available to suggest that many labor problems are rooted in management's inability or lack of desire to manage in a fashion appropriate to current conditions. Moreover, labor too often is overlooked as a powerful means for increasing productivity. Indeed, public and private solid waste systems have found that it pays to overcome the view of labor as an inevitable source of productivity problems which must be dealt with on an adversary basis at the bargaining table.

Management must first recognize the problems experienced by workers. Much of the labor force in the industry does have limited education, is black or ethnic, and is defensive toward the public since they feel their jobs carry low status. Job satisfaction is all the worse since most tasks are highly repetitive and routinized. Productivity increases, therefore, can often be tied to improved morale.

Greater work satisfaction, which leads to productivity increases, has resulted from several innovations: introducing disposable bags; making even small improvements in the manner of performing dull tasks; initiating safety training programs (in an industry rated one of the most dangerous in America); providing career ladders that reach into other municipal departments; instituting task systems to replace the traditional eight-hour day; and using the labor force as an invaluable source of information (the refuse collector's familiarity with day-to-day operations puts him in a unique position to detect equipment inefficiencies and poor routing patterns).

Solid waste management is a local problem differing greatly from area to area—a diversity which in itself has created the need to examine local problems and identify local solutions. This need has been heightened by the low priority given by local administrators to the "garbage" industry, a situation which is reflected in the limited analytical capability assigned to solid waste problems.

A coordinating body should be charged with studying successes and failures of existing technologies and systems; collecting, evaluating, and disseminating information on solid waste systems; offering direct technical assistance through personal contact with local administrators; and advocating the adoption of best-known techniques in response to the needs felt by these local administrators.

(B) ENERGY SHORTAGES AND THE WASTE OF POTENTIAL ENERGY RESOURCES

1. Midwest Research Institute, "Resource Recovery" (1973), pp. 14:

Technical Summary: Only two methods are currently fully developed and practiced for the recovery of resources from mixed municipal