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The Ocean and Waste Disposal
| Article
# : |
16974 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
1,907 Words |
| Author
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Michael A. Champ
Michael A. Champ served as a resident scholar for the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers. He is now president of Environmental Systems
Development Co. in Falls Church, Virginia, and a senior
scientist at the Geochemical and Environmental Research Group
at Texas A&M University. |
From the earliest times the ocean has been used for the disposal of civilization's wastes. Refuse from his has always been thrown overboard. Fish processing wastes - fish parts, culls, and inedible species - have been discarded into the sea since the time humankind began to fish. In the United Kingdom, the practice of ocean dumping of sewage sludge was initiated in 1887 with the dumping of the city of London's wastes into the outer Thames estuary. In the United States, the first dumping of sewage sludge occurred in 1924 in the New York Bight. The ocean historically provided an economical NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) outlet for waste disposal.
Around the mid-1970s, as the public became aware of coastal pollution problems, a "protected status" toward the ocean began to emerge in regard to the disposal of wastes. Simultaneously, "equally" standards were established in federal regulations (i.e., inland cities would be economically disadvantaged if coastal cities were allowed to discharge wastes into the ocean.). The protected status developed due to the onslaught of unregulated waste discharges, illegal industrial dumping of toxic wastes on the high seas, and the identification of major environmental crises in several coastal regions of the world (the New York Bight, the Houston Ship Channel, Japan's Bay of Minamata, and the Mediterranean Sea). In the minds of many environmentalists, there was a need for this status until more information was available. The prevalent belief was that the ocean should only be used for waste disposal as a last-resort alternative. Also, since the ocean is a resource common to all the world and not protected by the marketplace or political forces, ocean disposal should not be permitted for persistent, toxic materials unless disposal in other ways has greater environmental impacts.
As these perspectives developed, more detailed scientific and policy concerns were identified. (1) Any large addition of chemicals to the ocean was predicted to disrupt the stable chemical and osmotic balance that exists between marine organisms and seawater. (2) The complexity and interdependence in marine food webs suggested that they were very delicate and easy to disrupt. (3) There was a limited ability to take remedial action after the wastes were dumped into the ocean, whereas contamination on land was thought to remain confined and available to future disposal options. (4) The costs of using the ocean were considered inversely related to incentives for the waste disposer to develop pretreatment, recycling, or land based alternatives.
The Public's Best Interest
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