No Room at the Bin

...The city sells the steam to the nearby Mohawk Rubber Company...

...Companies have found that the path to riches is not paved with recovered garbage...

...Clair, vice president for information of the National Center for Resource Recovery, a Washington-based organization which has pushed the technology, it was originally developed to get rid of garbage and recover some scrap...

...Such laws could mean the end of large-scale recycling...

...With Federal funds virtually gone and no other source of money in sight, NCRR threw in the paper towel at the end of September and shut its doors...

...Nor does the litter tax prevent excessive packaging and other sins of over-consumption...

...Solid waste experts say that small, mass-burning facilities can eliminate most of the technical problems of the big plants...

...A bottle bill initiative went down to a resounding defeat in Ohio in 1979 after industry spent $2 million in four months to beat it...

...At intermediate processing plants, materials are separated and crushed or baled so they will be in their most concentrated—and valuable—form...

...A 1955 Life magazine report on "Throwaway Living" approvingly featured such products as throwaway draperies, disposable duck decoys, and a barbecue grill—complete with asbestos shell—designed to cook only one meal...

...Such cans and bottles were unusual in 1947, but by the late 1970s-they accounted for more than three-fifths of all soft drink containers...

...As usual, corporate America has come up with an answer...

...Average citizens in communities across the country can also cut themselves in for a piece of the increasingly profitable action...

...A similar system went into effect in Seattle last year, although residents can still dump garbage themselves at collection stations free of charge...

...Members of this trade group, like their counterparts in the hightech resource recovery industry, are opposed to programs designed to cut down on waste since their growth depends on a never-ending supply of trash...

...One problem, in the early going, was that it didn't have enough garbage to burn...

...Farthest along are plans for two mass burning plants—a $185 million facility to go up at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard and a $132 million plant in the Bronx...

...Today," Seldman and California solid waste activist Dan Knapp have written, "mass consumption and mass disposal can be shown to be incompatible with appropriately scaled and humanly oriented politics...

...Lane County, Oregon, is a case in point...

...sometimes, existing generator equipment must be modified before RDFs can be burned...

...Other daunting problems with resource recovery: The technology does little or nothing about the initial consumption of resources, and it uses far more energy than reuse or less high-tech recycling...

...And resource recovery—like nuclear power, the high-techology solution to the problem— has failed...

...The transition from an economy that uses only virgin materials to one that exploits recycled waste offers consumers and communities a chance to exercise unprecedented control over the nation's resources...

...Huge drag-lines snap up enormous bites of garbage and disgorge them onto steel-treaded wagon trains, which creep up garbage mountains and across endless garbage plains...

...For most of this period, many American cities simply burned their trash...

...And in all this there's a nice little message for the extortionist Arabs: We are developing a new domestic energy source, so go drink your oil...

...remove labels...

...The emerging plants in recycling are the same companies that dominate their particular manufacturing fields...

...Each day, almost 11,000 tons of trash— beer cans, Coke bottles, shreds of plastic wrap, newspapers, lemon peels—join the heap...

...While the disposable grill never caught on, a number of other throwaway items did, and packaging became more and more elaborate...

...But now that more localities are bringing their garbage to Saugus, and the Department of Energy has provided some funding, the plant is reportedly making money...

...After all, says Neil Seldman, recycling gives neighborhoods and cities the chance to set up small "end use" businesses^—for instance, the making of insulation from used newsprint or glass—so they can break out of the conventional consumer/production cycle...

...These days, though, probably the most politically palatable idea for reducing garbage is the reintroduction of the returnable beverage container...

...Meanwhile, at the forty-odd resource recovery plants already built in the United States, the tales of woe dwarf the Saugus success: 1 In the early 1970s, Baltimore contracted with Monsanto for a 600-ton-per-day pyrolysis facility, which would burn waste in an oxygen-deficient atmosphere...

...According to Sherry Koehler of the New York City Department of Sanitation, New York eventually hopes to run seven to ten resource recovery plants...

...The cost of disposal: $4 billion per year...

...You have to understand that the NARI people are just in it for money...

...They claim to support resource recovery because of the country's energy needs and waste disposal problems...

...And in New Orleans, the city agreed to pay a penalty to a materials recovery plant operator if it enacted a law that got in his way, such as a ban on disposable beverage containers that threatened the waste stream...

...The group is exploring various corporate options that allow for community equity...

...But there are still formidable obstacles to municipal or locally based recycling systems...

...In 1973, when the state legislature seemed likely to approve deposit legislation, business proposed a packaging law instead, thinking it would never pass or would be thrown out by the courts...

...Directors have come from Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Dow Chemical, International Paper, packaging industry unions, and the U.S...

...About 35 per cent of the town's residents already participate, Gallagher says, and a plan to get commercial establishments involved is in the works...

...So far the project has been at least a political success...

...Bob Swanson of Washington Citizens for Recycling says so far the reduction in solid waste is not dramatic, although even a slowdown of garbage growth in booming Seattle is an achievement...

...the hazardous waste issue, as EPA's Kate Bouve says, has become "more politically combustible...

...Some older cities began running out of space, and even where room was plentiful, the siting of landfills became a political headache...

...If some activists have their way, New York and other cities will turn their priorities around...

...That's not even half of the 26,000 tons of trash that gets tossed daily into the garbage bins of the Big Apple...

...Still, some environmentalists believe the litter tax is a good start toward coping with the garbage issue...

...But the bill did pass and has since survived a legal challenge by industry groups...

...For instance, nine cents of each grocery dollar goes for bags and boxes destined for the nation's trash cans...

...Today it is difficult for many people to conceive of such a future...

...In other words, communities would be in a position to create alternative, locally-controlled economies...

...There's less waste to dispose of and less air and water pollution to boot...

...Technical snags are not resource recovery's only problem...

...When it's impossible to manufacture an end product, Seldman says, intermediate processing can keep resources at the local level...

...In reality, the junk goes to landfills like Fresh Kills, some half a million acres of them nationwide...

...In the South Bronx, the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation is using vegetable waste from the area's Hunts Point Produce Market in compost it hopes will help turn the area's 300 or so acres of vacant land into parks and community vegetable gardens...

...Only 6,000 of them comply with environmental rules...

...At the same time, the wider variety of materials in the waste stream made it harder to sort garbage for future use...

...And so resource recovery gives local governments a vested interest in encouraging lots of garbage and discouraging recycling...

...At an experimental fill at Pennsylvania State University, a bed of concrete one foot thick was laid down before dumping began...

...The other type of garbage-to-energy plant yields so-called Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF), trash rendered down to a- simple fluff or compressed pellet form...

...When rainwater percolates through a landfill, it can dissolve gases, salts, and oxides and form leachate...

...A variety of tax breaks have been showered upon the virgin materials industries, and, until recently, railroads were allowed to charge much more to haul recycled than virgin materials...

...This lowers energy costs for the university and refuse disposal costs for the towns...

...And according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, as manufacturing became more centralized, local markets disappeared, and recycling and reuse became less practical...

...According to Environmental Action, Michigan is saving $15 million a year on roadside litter clean-up and garbage disposal since its bottle bill went into effect...

...Most Americans^—either by choice or for lack of options—still buy overpackaged goods and throw the wrapping away...

...The experience of cities which have preceded New York down the resource recovery path, though, is not reassuring...

...Then, as energy prices rose and sure supplies dropped, marketable fuels became a more attractive end product...

...We know any community can recycle 25 per cent of its post-consumer waste," says Seldman...

...In 1978, a House of Representatives subcommittee concluded, "The claims made on behalf of resource recovery have overstated the accomplishments and understated the costs...

...A year later, when the garbage was cleared off, there was no concrete to be found...

...RDF plants are usually more expensive to run, but cheaper to build, than mass burners...

...Scarce virgin materials are conserved, and, perhaps best of all, jobs are created, especially in cities...

...New York is not alone in facing a solid waste crisis...

...And the troubles do not stop with assuring operators of adequate supplies of garbage...

...One inspector said the plant's odor was "bad enough to gag a maggot...

...It had been eaten away by the acid that had dripped down on it...

...No one wants a garbage dump next door...

...Mass burning plants are basically glorified incinerators that burn trash to produce steam...

...disposal operations promise to be self-supporting...

...With garbage now accorded the status of a resource, there is no need to mend our profligate ways...

...Jerry Powell of Oregon's Resource Conservation Consultants says the company does not necessarily use all the wastepaper it collects but wants to sell it to its competitors at the right price...

...One is groundwater contamination...

...Cities from coast to coast are now threatened with burial under their own debris...

...Opened in 1975, the plant lost $2 million before taxes in 1978...

...The Federal Government found in 1979 that per capita consumption of every major fuel and natural resource except coal had increased during the postwar era...

...All this is leading to a new form of vertical integration, especially in the aluminum and paper industries...

...And they can enact so-called flow control ordinances, which require that garbage go to the local resource recovery plant...

...For example, the Southeast Nebraska Small Farm Action Group is getting local government, the private sector, and communities together in an effort to develop a new rubber recycling industry in the region...

...She expects WRAP to break even next year...

...Such projects address more than just waste management problems...

...Dutch settlers named Fresh Kills for the tidewater creek they found rising in the middle of Staten Island...

...It's not a pretty picture...

...It was only after the war that we became a throwaway society in earnest...

...For many local governments, resource recovery must look like a dream come true...

...Resource recovery plant enthusiasts do not relish the competition for the requisite supplies of garbage, and they have flexed enough muscle and worked the right levers to get their way...

...Seven years ago, Dun and Bradstreet predicted that the recycling industry would be the biggest U.S...

...By 1985, the EPA estimates, Americans could be generating 180 million tons of garbage annually...

...Some solid waste experts say that one alternative to Islip-style recycling is the so-called user fee, which charges residents and industry according to the amount of trash they generate...

...gather up their newspapers, corrugated cardboard, and plastic bottles, and put them all in one container for pickup...

...Opponents of landfills have some powerful arguments on their side...

...The plant can process seventy-five tons of garbage per day...

...But by now almost everyone realizes that the great garbage jag is over...

...Despite all this, Federal subsidies made resource recovery seem like a bargain for several years...

...Meanwhile, the market problems and technical difficulties have combined to make most resource recovery plants money-losers...

...With only a few incinerators, no new landfill sites available, and New Jersey ready to clamp down on the tons of commercial waste trucked across the state line daily, New York officials say they will keep sending garbage to Fresh Kills for decades...

...Americans produce approximately 148 million tons of solid waste annually: about three-and-one-half pounds a day for every consumer in the land...

...Much hazardous waste—paints, industrial cleaning solvents, and the like—turns up in landfills...

...Next, the City would set up a comprehensive collection and recycling program...

...The ability of the water table to absorb leachate has been way overloaded...

...economic sector, save for agriculture, by the year 2000...

...Cliff Case, who heads the public interest National Recycling Coalition, explains NARI's motive: If recycling is increased, he says, then the price of materials will go down...

...And they believe that, if such a society comes about, "It all will have happened because lay people, organized at the local level, took leadership into their own hands...

...One landfill in Bethpage, New York, is home to so much hazardous waste that it ranks after two toxic waste dumps as the state's third most hazardous site...

...And even "nonhazardous" materials can cause problems...

...So, if New York City were to relieve the Fresh Kills landfill with an integrated waste management program, it would first pass a bottle bill...

...Last year, a study found that this leachate, to borrow the hydrologists' term, teems with microbial life and is tainted with arsenic, PCBs, and other poisons...

...But industry has a fall-back position of sorts...

...In Fresno, California, a local plant uses recovered newsprint to make insulation for local homes...

...For instance, in the Northwest, trucks from the forest products giant Weyerhaeuser comb the countryside for newfangled industrial feedstocks...

...Only then would high-tech resource recovery be considered...

...Emblematic of the move to the throwaway society is the growth in the use of disposable beverage containers...

...According to The New York Times, in the early 1970s as many as fifty firms got into resource recovery, but, by 1979, only twenty were still in the field...

...Industry fights bottle bills—and fights them hard...

...The rest you dispose of in a manner that gets the most out of what's there...

...The big question now is not whether the American economy's waste disposal patterns will change, but who will control the transformation...

...f A $53 million plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was supposed to manufacture "Eco-Fuel," was open for eighteen months but burned only three-and-one-half weeks' worth of garbage...

...Seldman sees the current garbage crisis as a cultural watershed that will revolutionize the way people think and live...

...Janet Marinelli is a contributing editor and Gail Robinson an editor of Environmental Action in Washington, D. C...

...There's a gradual stepping up, he says, from collecting of recyclable materials to more complicated processing and managerial jobs...

...Already, a number of cities are trying to turn their troublesome trash into a productive resource, and corporations all around have been rushing to help them...

...America, it seems, has been built on waste, and some economists have even argued that the dependency has boosted the "through-put" economy nicely along—in other words, it stokes up the gross national product...

...The rise—and, it seems, the inevitable demise—of high-tech resource recovery is best traced through a look at the National Center for Resource Recovery (NCRR), which was founded in 1970...

...New York City, for one, has apparently fallen for it...

...Corporate big-timers have come to realize they will have to depend more and more on American consumers for raw materials, and on the recycling of them into new products and profits...

...With the cost of compliance rising and land for sites disappearing fast, cities have been scrambling for solutions...

...BY JANET MARINELLI AND GAIL ROBINSON The Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, New York, is the world's largest garbage dump...

...Parts of the plant never worked, and solidified garbage reportedly had to be blasted out with dynamite...

...Lois Florence, Environmental Action Foundation's solid waste expert, explains how it works: "Integrated waste management means starting with waste reduction and re-use...

...The ones that do exist grossly violate environmental standards...

...It can be even tougher to find a market for the derived fuel and by-products of the process...

...Before World War II, discardables were typically sorted for reuse either at home or after collection by sanitation crews, and organic wastes went to municipal piggeries and farms...

...But Koehler says mass burners are working successfully elsewhere...

...They know that the United States cannot continue to consume 40 per cent of the world's resources...

...The small burners also cost less and require less trash, putting them within the reach of small cities...

...Salem, Virginia, also uses a small incinerator to mass-burn trash...

...Ideally, says Florence, only ash from the mass burner would have to be dumped in a landfill...

...And, in 1977, one-way beer cans outnumbered refillables five to one...

...The tax has won support from industry, because, say distrustful environmentalists, it tends to deflect public pressure for harsher measures, and manufacturers can easily pass the small charges on to consumers...

...More complicated separation—putting all the glass, aluminum, and so on into separate containers—is not required, says Elizabeth Gallagher of Islip's Department of Environmental Control, because "taxes here are pretty high and we didn't want to inconvenience anyone any more than we had to...

...Worse, it is threatening drinking water sources...

...Landfills will last longer, so messy battles over where to put dumps can be postponed...

...Last year, the State Department of Environmental Conservation charged that the nearby Hauppauge landfill was polluting underground drinking water supplies and emitting vinyl chloride into the air...

...With garbage-making in disrepute, recycling has come into vogue...

...The materials are then sold...

...It's not surprising that resource recovery has become so popular...

...RDFs sound like a great idea, but they must often be mixed with some fossil fuel for burning...

...NCRR, he says, has tried "to save the capitalist way of doing business...

...But the City is moving in none of these directions...

...Although governments cannot make people throw things away, they can resist popular efforts to reduce the amount of trash...

...Last July, WRAP went townwide...

...Fifty per cent of all cities reached their landfill capacity five years ago," says Neil Seldman, director of the waste utilization project at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C...

...The Weyerhaeusers, Alcoas, and Kaisers can use their huge capital resources to squeeze out the small, local recycler...

...According to C. Wade St...

...Resource recovery is designed to clean up a problem after it is created, not prevent it in the first place...

...Western Community Industries, a community-based corporation, buys all the newsprint it needs from the local recycling program...

...Far more controversial are the so-called source reduction programs—those that try to cut back on the amount of trash generated in the first place...

...To put it another way, there's a "hard path" and a "soft path" in the garbage business...

...The U.S...

...Taxpayers won't grouse about sorting their garbage because a machine does it all...

...User fees have been in effect for only a year, yet the amount of waste dumped at county transfer stations has dropped 25 per cent, and the local recycling agency has reported a 42 per cent increase in the volume of materials processed...

...But in public education, the problem comes in deciding what to say...

...Should Americans be discouraged from tossing beer cans on the highway or should they be told not to buy offending brands in the first place...

...Swanson says there has been very little opposition to the user fees...

...many of them represent industries that produce a lot of what ends up as garbage...

...These efforts go to the very heart of the throwaway society...

...And, at some point, recycling has to involve some kind of unified community action, whether it's getting residents to sort their trash or drumming up enough community support for a source separation facility...

...There's Weyerhaeuser and Alcoa, and then there's Islip township on Long Island, New York, the home of 300,000 people...

...An additional 8,000 tons of garbage will show up there each day...

...Then, of course, there is the fugitive pound of hazardous waste dispersed somewhere in the environment for each four pounds of trash...

...A group of communities in the Durham, New Hampshire, area formed the Lamprey Regional Solid Waste Cooperative in June 1978...

...This simple measure has resulted in the saving of the equivalent of twenty-nine million barrels of oil a year, cut the beverage industry's use of natural resources at least in half, and created jobs, although some jobs in container manufacturing have been lost...

...Disposable and over-packaged goods became common with the development of plastics...

...The simplest sort of resource recovery, mass burning, has long been used in Europe...

...However, according to EPA, there are 20,000 municipal land disposal sites in the United States which can lawfully receive everything from dead animals to liquid chemical wastes...

...So far, seven states require beverage container deposits...

...They call for a new, more democratic, and less wasteful society, "forged not only by engineers, business people, and government bureaucrats, but by community organizers, nutritionists, health workers, farmers, open space planners, and ordinary citizens...

...Public education programs are another way to start...

...Chamber of Commerce...

...As citizens of Saugus found out, enough garbage has to come in to make the plant cost-effective...

...Under the law, the state can review packaging for food, cosmetics, and cleaners...

...Although some bugs have been worked out since then, a number of resource recovery plants are in "shakedown"—closed while "adjustments" are made...

...Love Canal is related to the beer cans we throw away," says Arthur Purcell, author of The Waste Watchers...

...According to Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the overflow of landfills is nothing short of a "crisis of capitalism" since the obvious response is to throw less away and encourage neighborhood recycling...

...The word "recycling" conjures up images of harried householders lugging bags of bottles and bundles of newspapers to a center staffed by volunteers on weekends...

...In fiscal 1982, says DOE's Chris Kouts, money will be available for research and development only, and a comparatively paltry $5 million at that...

...City planners regarded landfills as the literal building blocks for new land, but their hopes were shortlived...

...Making products from recycled instead of virgin materials saves enormous quantities of energy—95 per cent in the case of aluminum manufacture and from 40 to 70 per cent in most other industries...

...It does not include the millions of tons of industrial wastes, sewage sludge, junked cars, and construction and demolition rubble piled up every year...

...The challenge of garbage, as of energy, is to look at the problem as a whole, to resist technological quick fixes, and to work toward a society where the "soft path" is controlled by communities and not by corporations...

...The answer is resource recovery, the extraction of reusable materials and fuels from garbage...

...Though he may be a fan of capitalism, Ronald Reagan dealt a severe blow to its defenders at NCRR...

...Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that is enough to fill the New Orleans Super-dome from floor to ceiling twice a day, every day of the year, with municipal solid waste...

...More stringent measures could conceivably require industry to make wholesale product line changes on the one hand, or dictate to consumers how trash is to be disposed of on the other...

...One of the most basic is the "litter tax," which places a tax on manufacturers whose products wind up as litter...

...Then Fresh Kills will be the only dump serving the City...

...In an economy where entry-level jobs are becoming increasingly scarce, Seldman claims, "Recycling is the best way to introduce someone to the labor force...

...Any truly integrated waste management strategy aims to stop the garbage excess before it starts...

...And that figure takes in only municipal wastes...

...Another problem is that decomposing material can give off volatile gases...

...At an old incinerator, twenty people are employed to sort the garbage by hand and by machine...

...But some activists charge that the people behind NCRR are really interested in deflecting public support for bottle bills and other slaps in the face of industry...

...But the energy situation has taught us that we can not go on consuming and wasting forever...

...But glass, paper, aluminum, and rubber companies—Weyerhaeuser, Alcoa, Kaiser, Reynolds, and the like—have been busy cornering the recycling market...

...They range in size from a $23 million facility in Chicago which can dispose of 1,600 tons of garbage a day to the $200,000, seven-ton-per-day unit operated by the Texas Department of Corrections in Gatesville...

...Today, from one-third to one-half, by weight, of all that remains after product use is packaging...

...People who live near the proposed Brooklyn facility are none too pleased, however...

...All this had a dramatic effect on the commitment of resources...

...If all this were taken into account, the true yearly total would be a staggering three to four billion tons...

...These facilities often separate out some materials to make the fuel product more combustible, and the left-overs, usually ferrous metals such as iron and steel, are then sold...

...It is estimated that comprehensive recycling could cut our national energy use by 5 per cent— compared to the mere 1 per cent saving mass burning offers with derivable energy...

...Proponents spent $80,000 in two years...

...Another problem, especially for small recyclers, is tracking down buyers while coping with the economics of scale...

...Federal regulations, particularly the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, were intended to curb indiscriminate dumping...

...Sometime in 1985, a Brooklyn landfill, New York City's second largest, is scheduled to close down...

...The greatest resource recovery success story, Wheelabrator-Frye Inc.'s $50 million mass burner in Saugus, Massachusetts, has hardly been something to cheer about...

...Forced to do something, the town kicked off its WRAP program—Wednesday Recyclables Are Picked Up—in some 33,000 homes...

...But despite surveys showing overwhelming support for the law, deposit legislation initiatives frequently lose at the polls...

...That means using small mass-burning units, for example, to produce steam for heating or cooling nearby businesses...

...The more municipal waste we generate, the more hazardous waste we generate...

...Under the program, Islip residents rinse out all their jars and cans...

...One such, methane, can explode at a landfill—or in a nearby neighborhood—with no warning and seemingly little human involvement...

...Minnesota has taken another route...

...Bottles and cans are then returned to retailers to be either recycled or refilled by distributors or brewers...

...Soft path waste disposal advocates favor a combination of such programs with recycling—an integrated waste management approach...

...But the Reagan Administration apparently has little interest in regulating solid waste disposal...

...The council obliged, and the resulting ordinance has been upheld in court...

...I don't think there's going to be a big jump in the industry," says a discouraged NCRR vice president St...

...They doubt it will be odorless, suspect it will pollute, and just don't want to be guinea pigs for a relatively untested technology...

...Clair...

...Today, after an investment of more than $30 million, Baltimore has given up on pyrolysis...

...Night and day, six days a week, trash arrives by barge from the city's other boroughs...

...When the Energy Security Act became law in 1980, the Department of Energy set up an Office of Energy from Municipal Waste and budgeted $220 million to help commercialize the technology...

...In all, more than 200 cities have recycling programs that generate cash and cost no more, and often less, than traditional garbage collection...

...Deposit legislation— the "bottle bill"—places a deposit on all beer and soda containers...

...But the gold in garbage need not go directly to corporate coffers...

...The people behind NCRR are devotees of high technology (several members of its senior staff came from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration...

...Then, in the 1970s, when government began to crack down on incinerator emissions with clean-air legislation, most cities abandoned burning for landfills...

...The co-op, a group of twelve towns plus the University of New Hampshire, decided to pool its trash, burn it at a plant on the university grounds, and sell the resulting steam to the school...

...Fifty-five per cent of the cost of high-tech facilities, according to one estimate, has been subsidized by one government program or another...

...Generally, such plants sell the steam they generate to nearby businesses...

...1 A $130 million plant designed to produce RDF and other materials in Hempstead, New York, remains shut down after traces of deadly dioxin turned up...

...These days, the "fresh" in Fresh Kills is but a term of art: Rainwater leaches through forty-foot deposits of refuse and collects in dark pools...

...The National Association of Recycling Industries (NARI) is where big business and recycling meet...

...Then you consider recycling, including giving things away— another form of re-use...

...In Akron, Ohio, for instance, underwriters of the city's resource recovery plant demanded that the city council first pass a control ordinance before they put any money on the line...

...America has not always been awash in junk...