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in large cities, where the volume of refuse and the high cost of land make incineration an attractive disposal method. Small quantities of solid wastes are turned into nutrient-rich soil conditioners by composting operations. And a small but troublesome percentage is dumped at

sea.

Land disposal of solid wastes can range from the most offensive flyand rat-infested open dump to technically advanced practices that end in the creation of parklands, golf courses, outdoor theaters, and other public facilities. Disposal sites in or near urban areas can be reclaimed for use as attractive open space if proper sanitary landfill practices are employed.

Imaginative thinking in land disposal practices is not widespread. Collected refuse is dumped in whatever area is available, with little or no provision for soil cover. Often city fathers blame spontaneous combustion for fires at these dumps. But in at least some cases, local sanitation officials set fire to wastes to reduce their volume because dumps are overloaded. Burning at open dumps remains a major cause of air pollution in some cities. Improper landfill techniques can spawn large quantities of methane gas and breed armies of rats, flies, and other pests. Disposal sites often mar wetlands and scenic areas. Some are uneconomical because of their distance from the city. In California, filling canyons and other natural areas has been censored by conservation groups..

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Strip mining for coal has scarred some landscapes in the United States and left them denuded of vegetation and open to erosion. Several years ago rail haul of solid wastes was proposed as a solution to two environmental problems-unsightly abandoned strip mines and the shortage of disposal sites near large eastern cities. The plan involved using railroad dump cars which usually return from cities to mining sites empty. Many factors, including outlying community resistance to taking in other people's refuse have limited that idea. But disposal costs in large cities have shot up so sharply that the concept is being reconsidered. A Federal grant has been awarded to the American Public Works Association to investigate hauling refuse by rail from large urban areas to remote, mined areas for landfilling.

Nearly 10 percent of domestic solid wastes is processed through incineration: 300 municipal incinerators account for about half the tonnage burned; the rest is consumed in thousands of small, privately owned trash burners. After incineration, about 25 percent of the waste by weight remains as ashes, glass, metals, and unburned combustibles. These then must be removed and recycled, or disposed of in some way. Since municipal incineration is often cited as a polluter of air, research is underway to improve incinerator technology.

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An insignificant amount of collected solid wastes in the United States is composted. Metals, glass, and similar inorganics are sorted from mixed refuse, and the remainder is converted to a peat-like organic fertilizer and soil conditioner. This process is widely used in Europe. Madrid composts 200 tons daily and Moscow is opening a new 600-ton-per-day facility. Composting has never been popular in the United States for several reasons. Compared to many Western European nations, land available for disposal sites in the United States is inexpensive. The compost product has not always been of uniform quality here; nor has it competed with commercial soil conditioners. Also, the composition of refuse in the United States makes it more difficult to compost, since its organic content is low. Finally, composting was first sold to American cities as a profitmaking venture. When it did not pay off, many cities considered the enterprise a failure. The Bureau of Solid Waste Management, jointly with the Tennessee Valley Authority, is operating an experimental composting plant in Johnson City, Tenn. But the results have not been encouraging. In recent years almost all composting plants in this country have shut down.

Some coastal cities and industries are turning to ocean disposal to get rid of solid waste. Lack of suitable land disposal sites and stricter air pollution standards for incinerators make ocean dumping look attractive.

2. Solid Waste Management Task Force, National League of Cities-U.S. Conference of Mayors, Cities and the Nation's Disposal Crisis (March 1973), pp. 1-3:

The disposal of wastes and the conservation of resources are two of the greatest problems to be understood and solved by this nation in the latter third of this century. With almost half of our cities running out of current disposal capacity in from one to five years, America's urban

areas face an immediate disposal crisis. The cities' management of solid waste will have to be conducted in the face of two critical trends:

1. The sky-rocketing volume of solid waste.

2. The sharp decline of available urban land for disposal sites. The rapid increase in solid waste generation, so characteristic of the nation as a whole, is even more pronounced in cities. In the past 50 years, the amount of waste discarded per person in the United States has doubled. In cities, however, solid waste volumes are estimated to have almost doubled in the past 20 years. The urban percentage of the total population, now 74 percent, has increased 10 percent since 1950. Between 1958 and 1976, packaging consumption (90 percent of which is disposed) will have increased an estimated 63 percent. Solid waste is growing five times faster than the population; cities must dispose of 20 percent more solid waste per person than other areas.

In other words, during the five-year amortized lifetime of one collection vehicle, a single city's waste load has averaged an estimated increase of between 15 and 20 percent. It is not surprising that disposal sites and disposal methods are ranked as the most pressing municipal solid waste needs.

The increased demands upon local waste management are complicated by the relationship between solid waste disposal and other environmental control systems. Federal policies and regulations aimed at protection of the nation's air and water have produced immense waste disposal consequences for cities. Both the increase of semi-liquid sludges and the prohibition against incineration in major cities have raised significantly the land requirements for municipal disposal.

As a result, at least half of our cities cannot rely totally upon land disposal of wastes within their own jurisdictions; they must consider other methods of disposal that do not require great areas of land.

In order to increase the amount of land available for disposal sites, multijurisdictional efforts have been tried. These efforts are commendable, but several impediments make them difficult, sometimes impossible, to achieve. Federally established freight rates and state laws relating to transportation of solid waste across interstate lines are prime inhibitors.

With land disposal sites at a premium and with an increase in other environmental concerns, the recovery rather than the disposal of potential resources is attractive in theory.

For cities, the lack of resource recovery opportunities has driven total disposal costs even higher. An estimated 16 to 24 percent of the nation's solid waste is potentially recoverable and reusable. Yet, cities are forced to expend $6 billion annually for collection and disposal; each year cities dispose of metals alone worth $5 billion, according to several estimates. Recovery and recycling, however, are not viable because they are not economically profitable. The markets for recycled materials are severely limited due to federal policies which favor the use of virgin materials and discourage, even penalize, the use of recycled materials. There are no market incentives in force for recycled materials; virgin materials, on the other hand, receive the benefit of federally established depletion allowances and capital gains tax cred

its. Even if cities were to recycle solid waste, the considerations of the marketplace would make it impractical.

Cities in our survey, when asked what they would most like to see embodied in new Federal solid waste legislation, listed the enhancement of recycling and resource recovery as their number one preference. It is not the choice of cities that only one percent of municipal wastes are recycled; it is an aggregate choice compelled by federal policies, limited markets and consumer preferences. Without markets for recovered resources and large scale recycling, cities are left to dispose of wastes they did not create on land they no longer have.

Financially, cities are already bearing the national burden of increasing disposal costs. Of the total direct solid waste expenditures for federal, state and selected large local governments in FY 71, 98 percent came from local governments. The estimated annual cost to cities of solid waste collection and disposal is $6 billion. It is the third largest local expenditure funded solely from local revenues. A dramatic example of local-federal inequities is this: Our 48 largest cities are spending nearly 50 percent of their environmental budgets for solid waste management, while the Administration's proposed federal budget for FY 74 earmarks only one percent of the federal environmental dollar for solid waste and deals with only one concern-the disposal of hazardous wastes.

Ultimately, the highest costs and the most crucial losses, in the absence of a national program of resource recovery, go beyond city budgets to the nation's declining reserve of natural resources. For a nation facing inevitable resource scarcity, it is highly significant that current federal policy shows no awareness of the relationship between the generation and disposal of solid wastes and the depletion of national

resources.

3. U.S.E.P.A., “Report to Congress on Resource Recovery" (February 1973), pp. 1-3:

U.S. Materials-Use Pattern. Resource recovery in its varied aspects must be seen as part of a much larger economic structure-the total materials and energy use patterns of the nation. Today the recovery of waste materials supplies a very small part of the total material and energy requirements of the U.S. population, and while both population and materials consumption are increasing, the use of materials from waste sources is declining relative to overall consumption.

In 1971, the U.S. economy used an estimated 5.8 billion tons of materials for its total activity, equivalent to 28 tons for each man, woman, and child. Of this total approximately 10 percent comes from agriculture, forestry, fishing, and animal husbandry (food and forest products); 34 percent is represented by fuels; and 55 percent comes from the minerals industries in the form of metals, construction materials, and other minerals.

Materials use is growing at a rate of 4 percent to 5 percent yearly. Per capita consumption was 22 tons in 1965, 24.7 tons in 1968, and 28 tons in 1971. During the same period, population grew at a rate of 1.3 percent annually.

A high rate of materials and energy consumption means a high rate of waste generation. Approximately 10 to 15 percent of annual inputs to the economy represent accumulation of materials in use (in structures, plant and equipment, etc.); the rest of the tonnage is used consumptively with residues discharged to the land, water, and air, or is used to replace obsolete products and structures which in turn become

waste.

Nearly all of the materials and energy required in the U.S. comes from virgin or natural resources. The tonnage of fabrication and obsolete wastes recycled is approximately 55 to 60 million tons, equivalent to less than 1 percent of total minerals tonnage required overall by the nation.

If we disregard food and energy substances, the estimated 1971 demand for nonfood, nonenergy materials was 3.6 billion tons, and waste recovery satisfied 1.5 to 1.7 percent of the total requirement. Environmental Consequences of Materials Use. Any form of materials use has environmental consequences. Materials resources must be extracted, purified, upgraded, processed, and fabricated into products; in addition, there are transportation steps between most of these steps.

At every point solid, waterborne, and airborne wastes are generated and either enter the environment or are removed from processing steps at some expense.

The production of 1,000 tons of steel, for instance, results in 2,800 tons of mine wastes, 121 tons of air pollutants, and 970 tons of solid wastes. Similar waste flows are associated with every materials flow, although, of course, the magnitudes vary depending on the types of materials obtained. The sheer growth in materials consumption per capita indicates that more pollution and waste is generated per citizen today than was generated in years past.

As will be discussed, reports at this time indicate that the amounts of air pollution, water pollution and waste that result from production systems that use recycled wastes are lower than the effluents from production systems that rely on virgin resources. Thus, any decrease in resource recovery relative to total consumption means an increase in the quantity of residuals generated.

Solid Waste Generation. Ever increasing per capita materials consumption necessarily means that more solid waste is generated. This can be illustrated graphically by trends in packaging consumption since packaging is a short-lived product category which becomes waste immediately after use.

Per capita packaging consumption (in pounds per capita) has been increasing steadily as shown below.

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The situation in packaging is merely an illustration of a general phenomenon of waste generation resulting from a materials consumption rate which grows faster than population.

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