Waste, industrial ecology, and sustainability - Garbage

Social Research, Spring, 1998 by Marian R. Chertow

CONNOTATIONS of the word waste are indeed broad: authors of this issue include historians, policy-makers, sociologists, and a poet. This inspires the thought that beyond the purview of the local sanitation worker lies waste as transcendent metaphor: embodied, for example, in Emma Lazarus's policy-shaping image of the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore" or, tragically, in Shakespeare's Richard II--"I wasted time, and now cloth time waste me." In this essay, however, I will stick with the more prosaic, bureaucratic meanings of waste--as defined in U.S. law and common municipal and industrial practice.

What each conception of waste has in common is the notion of something cast off. Often these cast-offs wind up by the side of the road or in a landfill. Sometimes people find value in them--table scrapings that become a meal for man or beast; discarded bottles that are recycled into new ones; industrial waste that becomes a feedstock to an entirely different process. Most recently, U.S. castoffs are trending downward. Even in categories where more waste is actually generated, less is simply discarded in favor of some type of reclamation.(1) Not only did we avoid a "garbage crisis" in the 1980s, but also, in the late 1990s, there are significant reasons to believe that ever-increasing waste is not inevitable. For the forces of the 1980s have led to a contextual shift in how we view waste today. Seen from the new perspective offered by industrial ecology in the broader framework of sustainable development, far fewer materials need be considered waste.

Two categories of waste are relevant for purposes of this essay. Ordinary trash from homes and businesses is called municipal solid waste (MSW). The more extensive outpouring of manufacturing processes is generally classified as nonhazardous industrial waste. Using these two categories allows us to view waste practices and attitudes both of producers, those in industry who create goods and services, and of consumers, those who use and often dispose of the by-products of those goods and services. Except for the design of disposal facilities, which must follow federal standards, much of the regulatory authority over these wastes is left to state and local government, so behavior across the country is variable, and is responsive to market forces. In contrast to the first two categories, wastes that are legally determined to be hazardous or radioactive have very strict management regimes under the regulatory authority of the U.S. federal government. In addition to these classifications are what are sometimes referred to as "special wastes," including tires, construction debris, water-treatment-plant sludge, and incinerator ash.

There are billions of tons of nonhazardous industrial waste and hundreds of millions of tons of municipal solid waste generated each year. Counting the billions from a wide variety of disparate industries has proven extraordinarily difficult, in part because a vast majority of the waste is liquid.(2) Another significant distinction is whether nonhazardous industrial waste is deposited on the site of the industrial facility, or whether it is removed and disposed in an off-site facility. There is almost no aggregate data about the on-site wastes except for a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted in the mid-1980s. The biggest sources are reported to be the pulp and paper and primary iron and steel industries, which account for about half of the approximately seven billion tons of industrial nonhazardous waste deposited on-site (EPA, 1988; U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment [hereafter OTA], 1992).

The hundreds of millions of tons of municipal solid waste, what most of us call garbage or trash, is also difficult to measure precisely. But we do have a reliable time series provided by the EPA from 1960 to the present. The EPA's method is based on a materials flow approach that looks at production data for the materials and products we know to be constituents of the waste stream. Alternatively, rather than rely on what should be created and disposed based on production figures, the staff of BioCycle magazine actually surveys each state each year to find out what current waste management practices are. Interestingly, although the numbers are about 100 million tons apart, they track each other fairly well. The discrepancy is largely explained by the fact that the BioCycle survey counts many of the special wastes that are actually disposed in municipal solid waste landfills every year, while the EPA study does not (EPA, 1996; Steuteville, 1996).

Over a ten-year period, we went from landfilling 83 percent of 158 million tons of municipal solid waste (131 million tons) to landfilling only 57 percent of 208 million tons (119 million tons). Nonhazardous industrial waste disposal is thought to have fallen, perhaps significantly, largely through increased reclamation rather than decreasing generation.(3) The levels of hazardous waste projected in the 1980s never materialized and led to severe losses by companies, such as Chemical Waste Management, investing in that business. Radioactive waste production is dominated by two sources: nuclear plants and nuclear warheads. The United States has not ordered a new nuclear plant since 1979, following Three Mile Island, and has actually been destroying nuclear warheads (Gerrard, 1994, Ch. 3). In this case, production is down, generation is down, and disposal is down as well (New York Times, December 7, 1997, p. 33) although the waste management challenges of decommissioning nuclear plants should not be underestimated.