HEALTH Dr. Rene Dubos has defined health as the sources to meet the needs of the future. Would you care to comment further on the extent to which health, well-being and welfare of man must be considered in the formulation of national policies in environmental quality planning? Dr. BENNETT. I would only say that I certainly agree with that particular definition of health although I have agreed with other definitions that have been promulgated, also. I think, though, that it is quite clear that in the health area, we are faced with a paradox. While it is possible to define numerous actions that may make for better health or for poorer health, it is exceedingly uncommon for individuals in our society to take or avoid those actions purely from a preventive viewpoint. Consequently, despite the fact that one can define these with certainty, many, if not most individuals, until they develop an obvious illness, tend to act on the basis of preference. As objectively as we may define the state of health or as objectively as we may define beauty, we find that individual actions are based on individual preferences. I think that the definition of health will have no more effect or no more impact on society's tendency to go in one direction or the other direction so far as environmental quality is concerned than will the definition of beauty or whether one prefers a landscape or whether one prefers a park in the middle of the city or whether one prefers to live in the country or in an apartment in the city, and so on. So, while I really agree with the definition, I cannot say that I think that to define health in this or any other fashion makes a substantive contribution to the solution of the social and political problems that we face in controling environmental quality. Senator SPONG. Thank you again, Dr. Bennett, for your very thorough and complete statement. Dr. BENNETT. Thank you. Senator SPONG. Dr. Eliassen. Dr. Eliassen, Dr. Bennett said that you would be testifying before the subcommittee; I was not aware that you would be the next witness. Very happy to have you here this morning. STATEMENT OF ROLF ELIASSEN, PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING, STANFORD UNIVERSITY Dr. ELIASSEN. Thank you, sir. I want to congratulate the committee on the excellence of the selection of assistants. As a Stanford professor, I am glad to see that you have two ex-Stanford students on your staff-Messrs. Grundy and Cummings. I appreciate the privilege of being invited to address your subcommittee today. You have heard much testimony on air and water pollution and the need for their control. I will talk a little bit on the subject of solid waste management. This is what Dr. Bennett said we were working on in OST, where I have been engaged as a consultant. SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT Solid waste management has great environmental significance in urban areas, in mining and industrial regions, and near cities where mass feeding of animals and processing of agricultural products take place. I will concentrate my remarks on the first item of your suggested outline. Solid waste management seeks a solution to one phase of the problem of pollution of the air, water, and land environment. These three realms are inevitably linked in urban areas: pollution of the air from municipal refuse dumps and outmoded incinerators; pollution of surface waters from industrial dumps, mill tailings, floating debris, and with the runoff from uncontrolled garbage dumping and filling areas; pollution of ground waters by infiltration of contaminated water from mineral dumps and refuse landfills; and desecration of the landscape by strip mines, tailings ponds, and piles from the processing of coal and minerals, and dumps for agricultural products and municipal refuse. AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY For the most part, technology is available for better control of these environmental insults. A coordinated information and education program is necessary on the part of municipal, county, and State governments to apprise the public and their officials of the existence of efficient and effective methods of solid waste management and to stimulate the desire to adopt these methods. INCINERATION For example, it is possible for an incinerator to be designed to generate steam refuse has half the heating value of coal. The connected powerplant could add thermal pollution to the river. Perhaps the heat would be sent to the air. These are environmental insults. Thus, many facets of solid waste management are inevitably connected with air, water, and land. Demonstration of proper practices is necessary. supported in part by the Federal Government. Economies of scale must also be proven to the public because the municipalities are prone to do everything by themselves. We have hundreds of municipal entities around the San Francisco Bay area. Each one zealously guards its little realm there and if we could only concentrate these into a few agencies we could achieve an economy of scale in air and water pollution control and in solid waste management. FEDERAL ROLE The Federal Government can do much, I think, to carry out engineering economic studies, to disseminate information to public officials through publications, conferences, and training programs. I don't think people realize the extent of solid waste production in this country. SOLID WASTES I have given some figures in my prepared testimony. Solid waste from urban areas approximate a billion pounds a day or 185 million tons a year. When the Corps of Engineers builds a dam, a million cubic yards is a very big dam-185 million tons of municipal refuse a year represents about 800 million cubic yards. That is enough for the Corps of Engineers to build 800 big dams a year, you see. The management and disposal of this volume becomes a formidable engineering task. The solid waste from the mining and processing of minerals amounts to approximately a billion tons a year. Agriculture and food processing industry are producing about 700 million tons of manure and another 290 million tons of crop residue. In some places, these are near urban areas and in other places they are in the rural areas. The subject of solid waste management is basically, I like to think, one of engineering economics and as you mentioned before it must be analyzed by the systems approach. We have been doing this for a good number of years in the pollution control field, long before military hardware was thought of. We were analyzing flow sheets and diagrams for waste management systems. We have made a practice of analyzing subsystems and this is what I have done in the prepared testimony. I won't bring it all out there but we have got to think of sources of solid wastes first. If there were some way to reduce the volume of solid waste from these domestic, commercial, agricultural, and industrial sources we would be in a better management position. Consider domestic wastes. Quantities are increasing every year as more nonreturnable packaging is used, amounting to from 3 pounds per person in 1930 and up to 512 pounds in 1980. Population growth and increase in per capita production is involved here. We have to blame it on the women, I guess, because they don't like to return bottles so the beverage people have developed glass and plastic nonreturnable bottles. The women like the paper bags and other disposable packages, all of which build up refuse quantities. The same with metal, glass, and wood. Of course, the packaging industry is producing more durable plastics and you cannot compress them in the sanitary landfill and they last forever. SANITARY LANDFILL The basic principle of land disposal, including sanitary landfill is traditional: "From dust you came, to dust you do return". The organics just decompose in the earth. But these new plastics defy nature. Not only that, but polyvinyl chloride which is a widely used type of bottling material, when burned gives off hydrochloric acid, creating a potential environmental hazard. In Paris, they had to cover the lower part of the incinerator boiler tubes because the hydrochloric acid produced attacked the steel. PACKAGING Somehow or other, just as in the detergent industry, we have to think in terms of "soft" packaging. You will recall that instead of hard detergents which created foam on waterways, we came to "soft" detergents, which decomposed in the environment. Maybe instead of "hard" packaging materials we have to think of "soft" packaging that will decompose in the land environment or burn without hazards. Whether this is the responsibility of the Federal Government or not, I am not sure, but maybe the pressure of the League of Women Voters or similar organizations can be put on the packaging industry. This is a very important matter as far as we are concerned because we have got to cut down the source of wastes and change their character. SOURCE CONTROL So, I am advocating the study of source control. It is also true of mining and mineral processing wastes. We don't want these big waste culm banks in the coal mining areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and the fires that are going on forever. You have mentioned before the matter of social costs. Maybe the person who buys the coal has got to pay for taking out the burnable matter. If they took out some of this pernicious matter, they could put the remainder back into the mine to prevent settling of the ground. CANNERY WASTES There are many research and demonstration projects that have to be done and I have mentioned these here. The National Canners Association is very active in California in machine-picking to counter the labor problems there. Of course, this leads to more wastes because for every ton of tomatoes harvested you have 3 tons of waste products. The same is true for the harvesting of many other types of fruit. Around the San Francisco Bay area, which is becoming urbanized so rapidly you have a million tons of fruit processing wastes which must be disposed of each year. The solid waste management program must be partly met in the field and partly in the cannery. There are a lot of research and demonstration studies that lie ahead, particularly in the urban areas, to meet the problem of agricultural solid wastes. SOLID WASTE COLLECTION Another sub-system in solid waste management is collection. We spend $3 billion a year on municipal solid wastes handling and about 75 to 85 percent of that is on collection. If we look upon the collection as a transportation system, then the application of the field of systems analysis you mentioned is certainly in order. It is necessary to simulate transportation systems by developing mathematical models and programs for computer studies to be able to do this. FEDERAL ROLE The old slogan in the computer analysis is: "garbage in garbage out." This means that with poor data, results are meaningless. We don't have enough garbage and other solid waste collection data to put into this computer program because the municipalities do not have the data. So, the Federal Government has got to help them or to encourage them to make extensive studies to obtain necessary data from municipalities, industries and institutional facilities all over the country in order that we put the proper information into the computer and obtain significant results. There are some real economies to be obtained in this collection field. RAIL HAULING I am not only including trucks; I am including trains. Business Week had an article in June on trains being used for solid waste transportation. The Southern Railway is considering hauling refuse down to your State of Virginia from Washington here. Whether Virginia wants it or not, is another question. Senator SPONG. I won't comment. Mr. ELIASSEN. All right. That is your privilege. Then they also talk about vacuum systems and air and liquid propulsion systems for refuse collection. These have to be analyzed, really studied, so that either one of two things is accomplished. We may be able to accomplish lesser costs but what we need more is better service for the same dollar expenditure. I mentioned transportation systems. But the prior handling of wastes by grinding, compaction, pelletizing, and other systems must be studied because these are all involved in total economy. In addition, you have to study the legal, political, and social aspects of longdistance hauling. I will mention that later because interstate problems are involved there. SOLID WASTE PROCESSING Now to discuss systems for the processing of solid waste. Dr. Bennett mentioned incinerating and composting; incineration means burning at high temperatures (above 1,400 degrees). The end products of combustion, the ashes and gases coming out should be innocuous. Unfortunately, there are only about 250 municipal incinerators operating in the United States today with the burning capacity of 75,000 tons per day. This is not enough. Many of these are outmoded and discharge gaseous effluents and residues of poor quality and require a number of air pollution control devices. I will not go into that now. CHICAGO One of the real difficulties of incineration that studies in Chicago disclosed is that people just burn solid wastes in an ordinary coal-fired furnace and or boiler. In Chicago, they collect 2 million tons of solid wastes a year. Less than a million tons is incinerated by the city or by contractors. Almost a million tons is disposed of by burning in over 25,000 individual units, apartments, and factories and regular coalburning furnaces. These individual units discharge over 10,000 tons of particulates and 30,000 tons of organic gases a year to the atmosphere so that you have here really uncontrolled combustion. There is so much to be done in this field, as well, to develop controlled combustion units for apartment houses and industries. The alternative is to make them stop burning on site and resort to municipal incineration. |