This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal in 1986 by David Morris and Neil Seldman.
Desperation makes for bad decisions. Witness the unseemly haste with which cities are rushing to burn their garbage.
The emergency is real enough. By 1990 more than half our cities will exhaust their current landfills. And while about 90% of America’s garbage is currently dumped in landfills, the siting of new ones usually arouses stiff citizen opposition. When available, they are remote and expensive. The result is an unprecedented rise in disposal costs in the past four years, to $90 from $20 per ton in Philadelphia, to $30 from $5 per ton in urban Minnesota, to $15 from $2.25 per ton in Southern California. Costs in the Los Angeles area will triple within three years as existing landfills reach capacity.
Not surprisingly, these dramatic changes have unleashed new entrepreneurial and technological energies as companies vie for a piece of the $100 billion garbage-disposal market. But to the astonishment and anger of many, city officials are ignoring the rich potential of this extraordinary technological revolution, and embracing the oldest and potentially most bedeviling disposal technology — incineration. More than 100 incineration plants await construction at a cost of more than $30 billion. If all the plants currently under negotiation or contract are actually built, almost half of U.S. municipal solid waste may be incinerated by the mid-1990s. Ironically, five years into the garbage revolution, U.S. cities are technologically racing into the 1940s and 1950s, the last time a comparable portion of U.S. garbage was burned.
City officials compare the $25- to $45-per-ton disposal cost of these so-called “mass burn” plants with the higher cost of new landfills. But they forget that at this price, incinerators no longer compete with landfills, but with a new generation of disposal techniques. Moreover, the cost of burn plants may be much higher than these estimates. For example, Westchester County, N.Y.’s 2,250-ton-per-day plant has increased overall disposal costs to more than $60 per ton. In Scarsdale, N.Y., where garbage disposal was once an insignificant budget item, costs are approaching the level of police and fire services.
Most city officials bought into incinerators only after touring successful European facilities. More than one mayor returned and echoed journalist Lincoln Steffens’s observation about the Soviet Union: “I’ve seen the future and it works.” Ironically, while America rushes to embrace incineration, Europe is having second thoughts. A Danish government survey of 45 solid-waste incinerator plants concluded that they were the major source of carcinogenic dioxins and furans in the atmosphere. In December 1984, Sweden imposed a moratorium on new incinerators. This past December, it extended it for another year.
Scientists argue about whether incinerators can be redesigned to eliminate the threat of dioxins and other worrisome pollutants. They agree, however, that investing in the best pollution-control technology will raise the cost of garbage disposal by more than $10 per ton, and probably price incinerators out of the market.
Pollution problems affect the balance sheets of burn plants another way. Incinerators burn only 70% of the garbage. The rest must be put in landfills. This residue is much more dangerous than the original garbage. In California, the fly ash must be sent to a Class 1 landfill for hazardous waste, at a cost of as much as $100 per ton. The bottom ash must be sent to a Class 2 landfill at a cost almost twice that of existing landfills.
Why continue down this unhappy path when viable alternatives to incineration exist, and new competitors enter the market every month? Visiting trade conferences and innovative plants here and in Europe we find the newer the technology, the more material recycled and the less burned.
A dozen operating plants in this country recycle 15% of their garbage. They cost less than the mass burn plants, and reduce pollution by more than 50%. Plants in Europe separate as much as 70% of the waste stream into individual materials. Some upgrade these recycled materials into new products. A Rome plant manufactures garbage bags from the recycled plastic. Every day, Rome sanitation workers replace 200,000 large garbage can bags for their customers; thousands of smaller kitchen bags are made for sale in retail stores. A U.S. company that licenses Italian technology now offers cities three options: 40% of the waste stream can be recycled and 45% processed into fuel, while 15% goes to a landfill; or, the paper, which often represents more than half of the garbage stream in U.S. cities, is pulped and sold to paper companies; or up to 70% of the waste stream is composted. These operations cost $25 to $35 per ton. Any residue from the process poses no dangerous disposal problems. More than half-a-dozen companies in the U.S. offer composting technologies that cost about $25 per ton.
These newer technologies are still developing mass markets for their products. Regrettably, the decisions cities are now making may foreclose this development and this new generation of disposal techniques. In part, this is a result of the size of the burn plants. Three years ago, 1,000 tons per day was average. Today, 2,000-ton-per-day plants are common. Detroit is building a 4,000-ton-per-day plant. That one plant will serve almost 1.5 million people! To add insult to injury, most localities can guarantee sufficient garbage to these giant plants only by enacting “flow-control” ordinances that prohibit alternative disposal techniques. That is, small-scale plants (100 to 500 tons per day) could not be built because there would be no garbage available.
Fundamental business theory tells us that a sudden and enduring price increase in one service will spur inventiveness and alternatives. That is happening in the world of garbage. We can only hope that cities, in their desperation to solve a clear and present emergency, do not preclude themselves from harvesting the fruits of this inventiveness.