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Rethinking The Municipal Landfill
| Article
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20015 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,049 Words |
| Author
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John Morelli
John Morelli is chairman of the Department of Environmental
Management at Rochester Institute of Technology. |
Until the 1970s, burying society's discards in a landfill was unquestionably the preferred solid waste management alternative in the United States. During that decade, however, concerns about groundwater contamination by leaking landfills, and U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies, leveraged a move toward waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration.
A variety of federal initiatives strengthened this move. The Resource Recovery Act of 1976 mandated the closure of many landfills. The Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978 required utilities to purchase the electricity produced by WTE plants. Tax cuts enacted in 1981 and 1982 offered incentives for the development of WTE facilities. The Reagan administration's push toward deregulation and privatization further encouraged such development.
Secure in the belief that a new and adequately supported direction had been established, regulatory agencies began ordering an increasing number of landfills to close. In 1988, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency projected that over 80 percent of the 6,000 operating landfills in the United States would be closed within 20 years.
But the tide quickly turned in the late eighties for a number of reasons. Lower energy prices, effective utility resistance to implementation of PURPA, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986's removal of some tax benefits all contributed to the decline of incineration as a waste management alternative. Also, during this time, a well-organized and sophisticated anti-incinerator movement focused the nation's attention on the industry's track record of poor technical performance and inadequate attention to health and safety concerns.
As a result, some looked toward recycling and waste reduction as cure-all alternatives to landfills and incinerators. However, neither comprehensive implementation strategies nor adequate technologies to support these new directions were in place. Meanwhile, the prevailing policy of closing landfills continued.
Recently, the public's view of the landfill as a viable solid waste management alternative has been obfuscated. The public relations efforts of the petrochemical industry, eager to sell more plastic bags, tried to convince the world that nothing degrades in landfills (especially not paper bags). A new breed of entrepreneurial "mythologicians" came up with self-serving assertions such as, "it is a common myth that waste degrades in landfills, "that "recycling saves trees," that
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