The Garbage Explosion

When city officials speak of the country as "wasting away," they are not punning. Waste--the uncontrolled proliferation of garbage, trash and scrap--is threatening to bury many U.S. cities. A serious problem for nearly all, it may soon become a crisis for many.

The garbage explosion already dwarfs population growth. While the number of people in the U.S. has gone up 30% since 1950, solid waste--largely as a result of the ever-increasing use of throw-away packages and containers--has gone up a full 60%, to 160 million tons a year, enough to fill 2,000 giant cargo ships. As the pile grows, traditional methods of disposal are proving increasingly inadequate or unacceptable.

Trash into Water. Burning rubbish in most of today's inefficient incinerators merely puts the dirt into the air (New York municipal incinerators spew out 38.6 tons a day), and most existing land-dump areas are quickly being filled up. Few populous neighborhoods will allow new ones to be established. The crisis that many cities will face in five or ten years has already hit San Francisco. For 44 years, the little town of Brisbane has served as San Francisco's major dump; now it has won a court order that may soon stop at the town line all trucks carrying garbage. "What," asked San Francisco's Mayor Jack Shelley in exasperation, "can we do with it? Shoot it to the moon?"

That might not be such a bad idea, but local officials and scientists, working for the first time with grants from a laggard Federal Government, are thinking of more down-to-earth solutions. Garbage has been used for years to create dry land from marshes and shallow tidal water; New York's La Guardia Airport is only one famous landmark that was built on refuse. Now Virginia Beach, Va., wants to see if it can turn its trash into a verdant natural stadium, using the leftovers to mold hills for children to play on.

Hempstead, N.Y., thinks that it can solve its water problems by desalting sea water with heat produced by burning rubbish in a "clean" incinerator, while Bergen County, N.J., plans to use its garbage to heat a community sports center. New York City's commissioner of air-pollution control, Austin Heller, reckons that if air-pollution could be prevented, the city could generate 25% to 50% of all the electricity it needs with garbage-fueled furnaces, thus possibly paying part of the cost of collection. After a tour of Europe, where garbage technology is years ahead of the U.S., three San Francisco experts came up with what they think is the permanent solution for their city's problem: incinerators as clean as laboratories that would turn waste into base material for roads and concrete.

Titanic Solution. Harvard has a research grant to determine whether waste can be burned far out at sea by incinerator ships, researchers elsewhere are trying to find a ready market for garbage compost. Since transportation accounts for 70% of the cost of waste disposal, another team is studying the possibility of using pipelines connected directly to household chutes to convey garbage--much as coal slurry is now carried--to distant incinerators.

The New York Central Railroad and New York's suburban Westchester County are thinking of compressing garbage like scrapped autos and cannonballing it to available upstate sites. One local humorist's suggestion would give Denver the most expensive garbage dumps of all: two dozen nearby Titan-missile silos, built at a cost of $27 million each in the '50s and since abandoned for a newer generation of missiles. But even this titanic solution would probably not last very long.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.