Garbage, Garbage, Everywhere

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Leading a climbing team up Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, Captain Richard Garrison, an Army chaplain, discovered that even the remote Alaskan wilderness has been despoiled. There, at 8,500 ft., was a pile of garbage -- partly eaten food, foil wrappers from freeze-dried meals, plastic bags and other trash left behind by previous climbers who had disobeyed the basic outdoor rule to backpack out all such junk. "It really detracts from the experience," says Garrison.

But at least the garbage was out of the sight and smell of most Alaskans. Some Chicagoans are not so fortunate. "As you bike past certain streets, you are overwhelmed by rancid smells of rotting garbage," says Jeannie Little of Greenville, S.C., passing though the Windy City on a tour of the U.S. From an apartment in a pricey neighborhood she can see rats in the alley below snacking on spilled morsels. Says Little: "I'm horrified by the fact that we generate so much garbage and don't have a place to put it."

That is a simple but accurate description of a situation approaching the crisis stage throughout the U.S. The affluent, fast-paced, throwaway American culture is producing trash on a stupendous scale. Between 1960 and 1986, the amount of American garbage grew 80%, from 87.5 million tons to 157.7 million tons annually. It is expected to increase 22% by the year 2000, when the malodorous mound will weigh 192.7 million tons.

- In a study comparing the U.S. with other nations, its pile of disposable diapers, melon rinds, grass clippings, plastic hamburger boxes, broken mattresses and discarded tires came to 1,547 lbs. for every man, woman and child in the country. Only Australians came close to producing as much waste: a prodigious 1,498 lbs. per person. The average West German or Japanese threw away about half as much. But even the U.S. figure pales next to that of California, where some calculations have the average citizen throwing away 2,555 lbs. a year. Says Attorney Jill Ratner, who is active in environmental causes: "In Los Angeles County we generate enough trash to fill Dodger Stadium with garbage every nine days or so."

Dodger Stadium, however, is not available for the purpose, and in a growing number of communities, neither is anything else. About 80% of U.S. trash is disposed of by burying it under thin layers of earth at a site known as a landfill. But an estimated half of the landfills in the country have filled and closed in the past decade, leaving about 9,200 with space remaining. Some 6,000 belong to counties, cities and towns. The Environmental Protection Agency projects that one-third of these will run out of space and shut down in the next five to ten years. In some areas the day of garbage reckoning is much closer. The two landfills in San Mateo County, near San Francisco, will be full next year, the one in Omaha's Douglas County in no more than 15 months.

Opening a new landfill, at least anywhere near a big city where they are most needed, is next to impossible. The NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome takes over. In this case, public fear is to some extent justified. In addition to being unsightly and smelly, all too many landfills leak pollutants (discarded cleaning fluids, for example) into groundwater.

The EPA last week moved to stop such pollution, and in the process may have hastened the day when there will be no place to dump garbage. The agency proposed regulations that would force all municipal landfills to monitor hazardous wastes and methane gas; ban discharge of harmful wastes into underground water; and strengthen controls on rodents, insects, fire and odor. While the new standards are reasonable -- some environmentalists consider them too lenient -- EPA Assistant Administrator J. Winston Porter says "very few" of the 6,000 municipal dumps could meet them now. When the limitations take full effect in 1991, some landfills may be forced to close while some new ones / will probably not open.

The EPA estimates that its landfill rules will eventually add $800 million to $900 million a year to the nation's garbage-disposal costs, now calculated at $4 billion to $5 billion annually. Virtually all of the additional load will fall on states and localities, intensifying what for many is already a heavy financial burden. As landfills have become choked and disposal more difficult, "tipping" fees paid by cities to contractors to dump their trash have rocketed from $10 a ton a decade ago to more than $100 in some sections of the Northeast. In the Midwest, Leroy Bannister, administrative assistant to Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer, reports, "In 1987 the city had a disposal budget of $19 million. For 1989 it will be $52 million" -- and that does not include any spending to comply with the EPA landfill regulations.

What to do? States and cities are pursuing a number of strategies to get rid of their garbage:

SHIP IT. The garbage crisis primarily afflicts the two coasts and major inland metropolitan areas such as Chicago and St. Louis. Large areas of the country still have open land for landfills, and garbage brokers are scouting those areas for potential trash dumps. But the South is mobilizing to stop any invasion of Yankee garbage. Environmental officials of eight Southern states conferred informally last spring to figure out a legal way to discourage garbage imports. Because of a Supreme Court decision ruling that garbage is a legitimate item of interstate commerce, out-of-state trash cannot be banned outright. But the Georgia general assembly in March passed a law making garbage imports difficult. Third World countries too are rebelling against garbage dumping by industrialized nations. Nigeria is putting a score or more of its citizens on trial for facilitating the dumping of dangerous Italian wastes; if convicted, they could be shot.

BURN IT. Incinerators can reduce garbage weight 70%, as well as produce heat that can be sold to generate electricity, thus reducing garbage-disposal costs. In addition, incinerator builders assert that new technology has removed many of the pollutants that escaped from chimneys in the 1960s and 1970s. So it is not surprising that a new generation of incinerators is developing. But NIMBY operates here too: some Minneapolis residents have mounted strong protests against a burner under construction near the downtown area. Like anti-landfill sentiment, opposition to incinerators has a reasoned basis. Environmentalist Barry Commoner insists that incinerators actually synthesize dioxin, a highly poisonous substance. True, scrubbers and other filters can eliminate dioxin from smoke, but not its concentrated form in the ash residue, causing a prickly problem of how and where to get rid of that hazardous waste.

RECYCLE IT. Many communities are taking a new look at this clean and, in some ways, most efficient solution. Illinois Governor James Thompson last week signed into law a bill requiring 18 of the state's largest counties, as well as metropolitan Chicago, to develop by March 1991 comprehensive waste- management programs that emphasize recycling. Said the Governor: "We're simply running out of room, out of time and out of money for facing these ((garbage-disposal)) problems in the same old way." EPA Administrator Porter has set a goal of having 25% of U.S. garbage recycled by 1992, vs. 10% now. Still, he concedes, recycling success will only delay rather than avert the day when landfills cannot take any more trash. Main problem with recycling: many Americans simply refuse to be bothered with sorting and separating garbage into recyclable and non-recyclable parts. Nor is there any practical way to compel them to do so.

Technology may help ease the looming crisis. One of the most troublesome elements in the garbage stream is the soaring use of plastic, which is difficult to burn or recycle and, because it is not biodegradable, will clog landfills for centuries. Early efforts to produce plastics that decay were less than successful: some disintegrated under sunlight, unavailable at the bottom of landfills. Others came apart after contact with water, causing supermarket executives to shudder at the thought of what would happen to the groceries in a plastic shopping bag containing a leaky milk bottle. But now there is a method of adding cornstarch to some plastics. Bacteria eat the starch, causing the plastic to fall apart into pieces that can be ingested by microorganisms. Result: the plastic disintegrates in four to seven years.

But in large part, the garbage crisis is a cultural crisis. The development of a throwaway, convenience culture helped create this mess; a real solution may require cultural change. For example, more than 20% of U.S. garbage comprises grass clippings and leaves stuffed into plastic bags and left for collection. Householders should simply leave that grass on their lawns or rake - it into a mulch pile, ignoring and thus revising the cultural demand for a golf green-neat lawn. Another cultural change would be required to get Americans to recycle 50% of their trash, as Japanese do. Cultural change is notoriously slow, but it might be speeded up in this instance by the lash of crisis. Americans have always treated garbage as something to be forgotten about the moment it is picked up from the curb. But the day may soon be coming when it will no longer be picked up because there will be no place to take it.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Cynthia Davis

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: The Garbage Project, University of Arizona}]CAPTION: Each American generates 25 lbs. of trash a week, according to an EPA study

DESCRIPTION: Percentage breakdown of components of garbage of average Tucson household; color illustration: man, woman, child standing next to garbage can.

With reporting by Steven Holmes/Washington and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago, with other bureaus