over. Obviously, he wanted to ask her for them, but was indecisive. Chances are she would have given the doors to him, surprised that anyone would want them, but all the same glad to avoid the waste. But he didn't get the words out in time. The doors went down. In fact, bound and determined to run its disposal operations efficiently, the Solid Waste Division can get downright mean when well-intentioned recyclers and other rule-breakers try to salvage valuable materials on their way to the pits. In a great many ways its purpose is to explicitly discourage salvage in favor of disposal. The designs invested in- like those at Glenwood Solid Waste Center and the rural sites, at Short By Dan Knapp Turning Waste into Wealth Mountain and back through a succession of landfills-amount to an increasingly mechanized and centralized disposal system. This is what the fancy words Solid Waste Management reduce to in practice. Yet disposal is a myth. When you dispose of something, it still goes someplace. A wastebasket, a toilet, a drop box, a sewerline, a landfill, even an incinerator-these are places. Things disposed of continue to exist-and continue to matter. Manic Disposal: End of the Landfill Era Here are some national trend data on garbage, so you can see that our county is hardly alone in the mania for "disposal": • The total volume of solid waste from mining, agricultural, municipal, industrial and sewage treatment activities is at least 2.8 billion tons a year and could be as much as 4 billion tons. This volume is increasing at a rate five times greater than the country's population. • Municipal solid waste-the most difficult category of waste to manage-is the fourth-largest type by volume and increasing by 8 percent annually. • In urban areas where approximately 74 percent of the total population now lives, solid waste has doubled in volume in the last twenty years. While some 90 percent of the nation's waste is disposed of on the land, nearly half of all major cities will exhaust their landfill c-apacity within five years. • Applying the current $27 per ton collection and disposal costs to our present waste volume, the annual national cost for solid waste management is about $7.8 billion, the third largest local expenditure funded from local revenues. If the 1985 projected costs of $50 per ton holds true, the fiscal impact of waste management on local government will be devasta.ting. July 1979 RAIN Page 11 • One great advantage of biological nutrient recycling over incineration schemes is that it can be done in smaller, more decentralized facilities located closer.to the source of waste generation. This, inherently, is more efficient-especially wlien a high-quality end product and effective public education increase public acceptance and use of the humus and other forms of high-grade stored energy that are produced from the organic wastes. • It is common practice to dispose of toxic materials at disposal sites not designed for hazardous waste disposal. Pits, ponds, and lagoons are often used for long-term storage or permanent disposal of liquid and hazardous wastes, and simple roadside disposal of hazardous wastes occurs as well. Although a large portion of buried solid waste is biodegradable, a small hut significant portion of our waste volume-3 7 million tonsis extremely dangerous and capable of causing virtually permanent damage to our environment. 2 Caught in the Act Waste planners will tell you that nothing less than a system for disposing of the total volume of mixed waste is worthy of their attention. In sewage treatment circles, this is called the "baseline alternative," and it is the bottom line when it gets down to what the public's money is used to finance. Typically, all other smaller-scale methods, including recycling in its myriad forms, are rejected on the way to the Big Machine or the Big Burner. Either/Or, One-Best-Option at its best-the thought process is pure reductio ad absurdum. Here are some actual examples of waste planners in their act of exercising Either/Or, One-Best-Option logic to eliminate all small-scale, decentralized systems from consideration: A personal favorite of mine is the set of working assumptions outlined by J.J. Troyan and D.P. Norris, engineers for the firm of Brown and Caldwell, in their cost-effectiveness study of "Alternatives for Small Wastewater Treatment Systems," paid for with a substantial grant and disseminated at public expense as a part of the EPA's Technology Transfer Seminar Program. Under the heading of Problem Conditions, Troyan and Norris recite the Catechism of sewage disposal: "To evaluate on-site sewage disposal systems and nonconventional community collection systems, three basic premises should be borne in mind: ... if site conditions are suitable, the conventional septic/ soil absorption system is the best type of on-site disposal system. ... if costs are reasonable, a conventional gravity sewagecollection system is the best type of community system. ... a conventional gravity collection system is the accepted standard for community sani.tation against which all alternatives should be measured." There you have it! While setting up their methodology for reviewing alternative sewage systems, authors Troyan and Norris manage to eliminate all waterless systems (primarily composting toilets), as well as most smaller, on-site biological water treatment systems, such as lagoons, greenhouse aquaculture systems and recirculating sand filters from consideration! The rest of the book is an examination of the comparative economics of grnvity versus pressure sewers, both of which usually assume conventional treatment. This citation has a special poignancy for me, as it has been utilized by Lane County's Water Pollution Control Division in bypassing serious consideration of on-site, small-scale nutrient recycling systems for local, small-town applications we have supported, and pushing ahead with standard sewer engineering. And what are the consequences? A sewer system for water-borne wastes is the precise anallogue of the open disposal pit for solid wastes-only it isn't open. It's a web of pipe underground and it has lots of small openings instead of one big one. Anybody can-and does- • dump just about anything liquid into sewers. Everything gets
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