WASTE MANAGEMENT RESEARCH AND TUESDAY, JULY 9, 1968 U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON AIR AND WATER POLLUTION, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., Senator William B. Spong, Jr., presiding. Present: Senator Spong. Also present: Richard B. Royce, chief clerk and staff director; Leon G. Billings and Richard D. Grundy, professional staff members. OPENING STATEMENT BY SENATOR SPONG Senator SPONG. The hearing will be in order. Today the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution continues hearings on waste management research and environmental quality management. Since the previous hearings the Senate Committee on Public Works has ordered reported S. 3201, which provides for a 1-year extension of the Solid Waste Disposal Act. This extension will provide sufficient time for completion of the comprehensive review of current solid waste disposal technology being undertaken by the President's Office of Science and Technology. Federal laws relating to solid waste disposal, air and water pollution, have been enacted, but the interrelationship of these environmental problems remains to be defined. A research strategy that emphasizes environmental quality management is needed if the goals defined by Congress are to be achieved. Successful implementation of these goals will require the development and improvement of pollution control technology. There is a need for action by both Government and industry to insure the development of technically feasible and economically reasonable methods of pollution control. While there is potential for the development of new technologies on a Government-industry cooperative basis, at the same time there is a need for a more mutual understanding of the respective roles of Government and industry. These hearings, as with previous hearings, are intended to provide an initial look at current Federal research activities in waste management research. Testimony has been requested within a framework which emphasizes concepts of environmental quality management and the role of the Federal Government in the development of control technology adequate to insure the implementation of pollution control legislation. Is Dr. Ivan L. Bennett, Jr., here? Dr. Bennett, we will hear from you at this time. Dr. Bennett, we would be pleased to receive in its entirety the statement you have submitted, and you may testify from it in part or in any way you desire. STATEMENT OF DR. IVAN L. BENNETT, JR., DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT Dr. BENNETT. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to appear before you again to discuss problems of restoring and preserving the quality of our environment. Through its many detailed hearings, field investigations, and thorough studies, this subcommittee has been instrumental in the identification and characterization of major environmental problems of our Nation and in bringing these problems into the forefront of public attention and concern. LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY The subcommittee also played a leading role in the development of the legislative authorities which established our national programs for abatement of water and air pollution and for solid waste management. Additionally, I consider it fitting and proper to pay tribute to the subcommittee's exemplary acceptance of responsibility for the important function of legislative oversight. It is axiomatic, perhaps, that there should be regular, objective assessments of progress toward fulfillment of objectives in even the simplest, most straightforward programs which involve the expenditure of public funds, but mounting responsibilities, pressures generated by ephemeral crises, and the myriad unexpected but urgent trivia that regularly combined to make a shambles of each day's carefully overloaded schedule, invite, indeed, almost demand procrastination. As a result, the axiom may go unheeded or be accorded no more than lipservice. Cumulative experience with pollution abatement makes it abundantly clear that eventual success in the ever growing and increasingly complex task of environmental control will be crucially dependent upon periodic reviews followed by any indicated readjustment of guidelines and goals or appropriate deletions, revisions, and realinements in action programs. The best decisions in these matters are candid, informed judgments, anchored solidly in past experience and with an eye to the future. They are facilitated by transparency of planning, execution, and reporting so as to permit the sharp beam of constructive criticism to permeate. EVALUATION This subcommittee's willingness to undertake searching reevaluations of our national environmental programs, to refine or extend authorizations for them, to broaden their coverages, and to introduce modifications that hold promise for improved effectiveness and greater efficiency has already established a fertile and creative cooperation in a common endeavor. Consequently, Mr. Chairman, I welcome particularly this opportunity to participate in your examination of the overall requirements for research in this area, the scope and scale of Federal support for research, the means of assuring expeditious development of the technologies required to implement our control programs, and related matters. ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY Before addressing myself to the highly pertinent points suggested by the subcommittee as a framework for these hearings I wish to discuss briefly some of the characteristics of the overall problem of environmental deterioration in the United States in order to assure perspective in our examination of the role and responsibility of the Federal Government in research and development in this field. WASTE MANAGEMENT As the subcommittee knows, while waste management, or more precisely, waste mismanagement, is our major cause of pollution in terms of sheer size, it is by no means the only threat. There are many contaminants which arise from sources not directly related to waste disposal. SYNTHETIC MATERIALS The "age of chemistry" has led to the introduction into use of literally thousands of synthetic agents. Some of these are toxic; the effects of others are still uncertain. Nearly all are present in the environment only in very low concentrations. Air, food, and water also contain numerous more familiar substances that, in high dosage, are well known to be acutely dangerous to man. Residues of pesticidal chemicals, gaseous hydrocarbons from the evaporation of gasoline, heavy metal residues, and carbon monoxide are examples. There is an urgent need for research on the effects of long-term exposure to small amounts of these materials, also. As Dr. Paul Kotin, Director of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health has emphasized, research on problems of this type is an exceedingly complicated undertaking for at least three reasons (see "Proceedings of 1968 Symposium in Biology," North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 1968, p. 6): 1. The investigation is not directed to exposure to overwhelmingly concentrations of environmental agents producing immediate or short-term, easily detectable responses, but to low-level concentrations over a long period of time that may or may not produce adverse effects. 2. The biological end points cannot be defined in advance; in essence, the twofold problem is to determine whether a hazard exists and what its manifestations in the host may be. 3. The additive or synergistic effect of combinations of agents may produce significant harmful effects in practice that will be missed in controlled laboratory tests with single substances. Because the rate of introduction of new synthetics is increasing, it is not feasible to assay every single agent in detail for possible longterm harmful effects. Direct observations in animals can be supplemented by epidemiological surveys in man for selected, representative compounds, but most important will be the development of principles for predicting reliably the probable toxicity of a given agent so that appropriate protective measures can be instituted. MONITORING There is a large and important area of concern where continuing research will be needed to identify problems, where long-term, careful observations are essential, and where, until now, both funds and trained personnel have been in short supply. The planned program for the Division of Environmental Sciences gives high priority to this type of study and the rate at which our knowledge in this area increases will be determined by the rate at which funding and people can be obtained for the Division, once its facilities have been completed. NOISE Noise from many sources can be properly considered as a pollutant, also, but I mention it here only for completeness. Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, Chairman of the Committee on Pollution of the National Academy of Sciences, has defined pollution as an excess of anything, especially people. (See: Waste Management and Control, a report to the Federal Council for Science and Technology by the Committee on Pollution, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, NAS-NRC publication 1400, Washington, D.C., 1966.) All other aspects of the problem are side effects of the major difficulty which is overconcentration of people. WASTE MANAGEMENT As the subcommittee has noted by its decision to hold these hearings, it is now more useful to look upon most of our environmental problems as a matter of waste control and waste management rather than as pollution. SYSTEMS ANALYSIS Our present system of production and distribution is a gigantic enterprise. In an oversimplified view of the system, raw materials from farms, mines, and forests are moved to processing centers and are then distributed to what Dr. John Borchert (Research Needs in Environmental Health, NAS-NRC publication 1419, Washington, D.C., 1967) professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, has called "a hierarchy of nodes within the network." These nodes include industrial plants, cities, towns, farms, and individual households. Thus, the relatively few materials which enter the network are elaborated and dispersed into an enormous number of products with a wide geographic scatter. Waste is generated at many points in the distribution network because the network, although highly organized, is incomplete in that it terminates in numerous dead ends and blind alleys where there is accumulation or dispersal of unusable or unused waste material. The driving force of modern technology and of rapid economic growth has both expanded inputs into this system and proliferated the terminals where wastes pile up, making the incomplete nature of the whole production distribution enterprise egregiously evident in the form of what we call pollution. PSAC REPORT Instead of consumers, we must think of users or converters because the truism that everything that enters the system must eventually leave it in one form or another has been brought home so forcefully by our new, overriding concern for environmental quality. This view has rarely been better expressed than in a remark made by Dr. John Tukey, professor of mathematics at Princeton and former chairman of the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee: It is not readily realized that essentially everything that is brought into a city must sooner or later be taken out. Even the material out of which you make the buildings goes out as demolition waste. Now that I have served on a pollution panel, when I stand at Princeton and watch full box cars going toward New York and empty box cars coming back, I have a strong feeling of concern as to where all that other stuff-the waste stuff-is going to go. This, I think, is essentially the basic problem of pollution. (Ibid.) NATURE OF PROBLEM Modern technology cannot yet produce the goods and services to support and improve our standard of living without creating wastes and products, in quantities which threaten our physical, social, and economic well-being. During the past two centuries, most governments of the world have devoted their efforts to the accumulation of material prosperity on an unprecedented scale, all in the belief that social and human adjustments would follow spontaneously as they had throughout history. What statesmen and politicians did not envision, and what many are still realizing is that, in the space of a few short decades, science and technology, quite literally, have made a new world and, at present rates of change, will remake the world at intervals of 10 to 20 years. As one writer has put it: Progress no longer trudges as it did in more sedate eras-mankind had about 1,000,000 years to accept the wheel before the first Model-T came along but less than half a century between the air-hopping of the Wright Brothers' pepped-up kite and the 600-mile-an-hour jet. (News Front, January 1967, page 87.) The heart of the matter is really the fact that we are plunging headlong toward an era in which change will be the permanent condition, not merely a feature of short phases of transition between long periods of relative stability. The impact of this new acceleration of change upon man's efforts at environmental control are already beginning to make the industrial revolution appear to have been a relatively modest alteration of human affairs. |