Solid waste management policy

DEFINITION: Procedures and regulations put in place by communities for dealing with the creation, accumulation, utilization, and eventual deposition of solid waste materials

When the disposal of solid wastes is mismanaged or inadequately addressed, the negative results for the environment can include air, water, and soil pollution. The policies that governments put in place for managing solid waste can thus have wide-ranging impacts.

No internationally recognized definition has been established regarding what constitutes solid waste. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a multinational body, employs a definition that excludes radioactive but includes hazardous waste. The federal government of the United States has adopted a definition that excludes most hazardous waste, except that included within municipal waste. Despite these definitional differences, the public policies adopted in regard to waste management have been reasonably similar among most economically advanced nations. The purpose behind the definitions has been to identify levels of danger posed by waste materials so that adequate management regimes can be constructed. Materials defined as radioactive, hazardous, or toxic require stricter controls than do those defined as solid waste.

History

Although it has been said that in nature there is no waste, it would appear that there has always been waste in human communities. For many centuries, however, the amount of generated and the dispersal of such materials were not recognized as problems. Like many environmental issues, became problematic largely as a result of the increase in human on the planet. As people began to live in more densely populated areas, they could no longer ignore the accumulation of solid waste. Evidence indicates that in the ancient cities of Africa and the Roman Empire people threw their solid waste on the floors of their dwellings. They lived in the midst of their waste, then built new streets and housing on top of the resultant mess. Eventually, urban dwellers developed a variety of ways of removing their waste products from their living areas: Wastes were gathered in cesspools, directed through drainage systems and systems, redistributed by scavengers, and dumped in designated places outside densely populated areas.

Urbanization and industrialization led to greater accumulations of waste and to collective decisions regarding how to deal with those accumulations. In addition to the problems generated by high concentrations of people on relatively small tracts of land, industrialization led to greater affluence, which correlates positively with the generation of solid waste. Municipal governments began to be expected to develop policies regulating waste disposal and to provide services to assist urban dwellers in dealing with their waste. In England, for example, the Poor Law Commission found in 1842 that a filthy promotes the spread of disease. This finding led to an increase in municipal services.

Sanitation services initially tended to operate on an “out of sight, out of mind” basis and focused on removing solid waste from densely populated areas. Collectors and scavengers gathered some of the waste and put it to other uses. Some waste was burned in incinerators, and some of the steam or electrical energy thus generated was put to use. Most of the solid waste, however, was dumped either into bodies of water or onto land.

Contemporary Trends

The United States leads the world in the generation of solid waste; its per-capita production is about twice that of other economically and industrially advanced nations. The People’s Republic of China, the most populous nation in the world, generates less than one-third the total amount of solid waste generated in the United States.

In 1970 William E. Small brought attention to solid waste as an environmental health problem with his book Third Pollution: The National Problem of Solid Waste Disposal, which discussed the problem of waste as a form of on a par with air and water pollution. It has now become clear, however, that solid waste is a multimedia environmental problem. In one sense there is no such thing as “disposal” of solid waste. Once solid waste is generated, it must be physically located in at least one of the three key environmental media: land, water, or air. When it is disposed of, solid waste remains in one of those three media. Thus all solid waste management policies must include guidelines as to how much waste will be allowed to be generated, how much will be redirected toward continued utility, how much will deposited into water, how much will be emitted into the air, and how much will be deposited on or into the land.

Although developed nations around the world are involved in ongoing efforts to reduce the volume of materials that are deposited in landfills, land dumping is still the most common answer to the garbage problem. Approximately 70 percent of the solid waste in economically advanced countries is deposited in landfills. Even when other solid waste management techniques are utilized, landfilling is often the final answer.

A wide variety of landfill technologies are in use. The first landfills were nothing more than places to garbage, but approaches to landfilling have become more sophisticated over the years. During the twentieth century, many town dumps were replaced by municipal sanitary landfills; in some advanced countries, sanitary landfills have been replaced by technologically sophisticated and carefully lined regional megalandfills. By the end of the twentieth century, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was predicting the closure of three-fourths of the landfills then in existence. This development was fueled by communities’ to the locating of solid waste management facilities in their vicinity (the “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, syndrome) and by the increasingly stringent technical requirements placed on landfills. The trend is toward fewer landfills, but the typical size of newer landfills is much larger, and the technology is more complex than that used to operate landfills in the past; consequently, the costs are also much higher.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, deposition of solid waste into bodies of water was seen as a good method of disposal, but this is no longer a popular option. Numerous laws have been put in place to prohibit the dumping of solid wastes into the oceans, such as the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act of 1972 (also known as the Ocean Dumping Act), but illegal dumping continues. Moreover, ocean dumping remains a legal option for many cities and for most commercial vessels. However, even if the practice of dumping solid waste into bodies of water were to stop today, the problem of pollution caused by such dumping would remain.

Incineration, Recycling, and Source Reduction

Incinerating solid waste reduces the volume of material that needs to be placed in a landfill, but the it produces must still be landfilled. Incineration also emits air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxins. Incineration has been an institutionalized practice since at least 1865, but it is still not a management technique used on a large percentage of solid waste. A small resurgence of technology in the United States during the 1980s quickly subsided because of problems with the technology, the economics of the approach, and citizen resistance. Incineration is used more widely in Europe and Japan than in the United States.

If waste materials are not to be deposited in water or on land, they must be reused. Resource recovery and are politically popular aspects of solid waste management policy, but their contributions are limited in three ways. First, not all solid waste materials appear to have recycling potential. Second, the costs of recovery may be prohibitive. Third, even recovered and recycled products may eventually be deposited in a landfill.

One approach to recycling is the conversion of materials into other products. Cardboard and newspaper are sometimes recycled into other paper products. Aluminum cans may be recycled into other aluminum products or into new aluminum cans. Some plastic products can be recycled into other plastic products—for example, milk cartons into fibers for apparel or foam cups into plastic lawn furniture. Yard waste (grass, leaves, and other matter) may be composted, but commercial facilities often experience difficulties with odor control. Solid waste may also be seen as an alternative energy source, given that a wide variety of materials may be burned in waste-to-energy facilities to generate steam or electricity; incineration, however, has its own drawbacks, as noted above.

Source reduction is the most fundamental answer to the solid waste problem, but it is also the most difficult to establish as public policy. It stands to reason that reducing the generation of waste will reduce the need to manage it, but the economic impacts of regulating waste generation have thus far prevented from becoming a significant part of solid waste management policy. In the United States the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980, also known as Superfund, created a “cradle-to-grave” legal regime that attempts to hold the original generators of hazardous wastes responsible for the costs of managing those wastes, even after they are deposited in legally approved sites.

Policy Making

It has been traditional in economically advanced, democratic nations to leave policy making regarding waste management to local governments. When the problems associated with solid waste were seen as primarily issues of disposal and local health effects, it made sense to leave policy making at that level, but after solid waste was identified as an environmental problem, policy makers became more inclined to recognize that, like other environmental problems, the impacts often extend beyond local political jurisdictions. Moreover, as the costs of managing solid waste increased, the need for funding assistance from larger units of government increased.

In the United States, for example, the federal government now plays a major role in developing solid waste management policy. Congress has created legislation, the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies have promulgated regulations, and federal courts have set parameters within which state and local governments must operate. President Lyndon B. Johnson was a leader in bringing the federal government into solid waste policy making, initiating action that resulted in passage of the Solid Waste Disposal Act in 1965 as an amendment to the Clean Air Act. In 1976 Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Subtitle D of which created the first national waste management program. In combination with other environmental laws, RCRA changed the way solid waste was managed in the United States.

Federal court decisions have further diminished local governments’ control over solid waste management policy making. In its decision in Philadelphia v. New Jersey (1978), the US Supreme Court said that garbage is to be treated the same as any other commercial commodity under the commerce clause of the US Constitution. This means that state laws and local government ordinances that interfere with interstate commerce in solid waste are unconstitutional. Consequently, state and local governments are not allowed to restrict solid waste that was generated outside their jurisdictions from entering into their jurisdictions. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s decision in C. & A. Carbonne, Inc., v. Town of Clarkstown, New York (1994) held that local governments cannot restrict solid waste that was generated within their jurisdictions from leaving. Without the ability to control solid waste’s entry into or exit from their jurisdictions, state and local governments are severely restricted in their ability to set solid waste management policy.

Another development in solid waste management policy has been the trend toward privatization. Privatization is not a new approach to solid waste management, but at the end of the twentieth century it saw a resurgence in popularity. Legislative antipathy toward command-and-control regulatory approaches, combined with the legal system’s treatment of solid waste management as a commercial activity rather than an issue of health and welfare, strengthened the role of private commercial enterprises in solid waste management.

Bibliography

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Blumberg, Louis, and Robert Gottlieb. War on Waste: Can America Win Its Battle with Garbage? Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1989.

Hickman, H. Lanier, Jr. American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste Management in the United States. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Forester Communications, 2003.

Luton, Larry S. The Politics of Garbage: A Community Perspective on Solid Waste Policy Making. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment. Rev. ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

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Twardowska, Irena, et al. Solid Waste: Assessment, Monitoring, and Remediation. San Diego, Calif.: Elsevier, 2004.