GARBAGE

Garbage is not an important energy source; but producing energy from garbage is a very important way of getting rid of it.

When the "energy crisis" was on, there was much talk about producing energy from refuse, mining landfills for methane, and other half-baked schemes to produce energy rather than disposing of the garbage. But the amount of methane in landfills is trivial compared with what is available as natural gas (especially if it were completely deregulated); the main importance of methane in landfills is its danger. Its natural production in landfills goes on for decades, and if it seeps to the surface, accidental ignition can cause dangerous explosions, such as the one at a Virginia landfill in 1984, which killed one man and seriously injured another.

Underground seepage from landfills may also contaminate ground water, and often does. But the most acute danger associated with landfills, especially in the East, is that cities and counties are running out of space for them. Philadelphia sends its trash as far as Maryland and Virginia; in New Jersey, dumping fees have doubled or tripled over the past two years. N.J., the most densely populated US state, has only 11 dumps for its 7 million people; some of the dumps are operated beyond their officially permitted capacity. The state of N.J. is suing some of its counties for non-compliance with its edicts on garbage dumps, and at least one county is suing the state back because it has to take the trash from other counties.

The obvious alternative to landfills is recycling and burring. Recycling produces a number of materials, most importantly fertilizer; and burning produces steam for both district heating and electric power. Contemporary refuse processing plants, which automatically sort and then process the refuse, can reduce the volume of the waste to some 10 to 15% (representing the remaining ash after utilization, which still has to be hauled to a landfill). This was the way many municipalities went until 1977, when the Clean Air Act put refuse-to-energy plants out of business. The result, in many cases, was dirtier air, not cleaner. Philadelphia, for example, rejected the proposal of a garbage-to-energy plant because of the difficulties of complying with the clean air legislation. Instead, the air is now being polluted by the notoriously unclean diesel engines of the trucks hauling thousands of tons of garbage all the way to Virginia every day.

As a matter of fact, bunting garbage is cleaner than burning coal, at least when judged by the combined amount of nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides and hydrogen chloride produced per kilowatt-hour of electricity. However, there has been some concern about the production of dioxin, which has been detected in the emissions of refuse processing plants. In August 1985, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College, CUNY, released a report claiming that dioxin in the atmosphere was already at an unacceptable level, and that unless garbage incinerators were shut down, their dioxin emissions could cause up to 270 cases of cancer per million people over a 70-year life span. (The EPA considers a chemical acceptable if that number does not exceed 10 per million.)

This is strange, since nobody knows what, if anything, dioxin does to humans, let alone how many cancers it can produce. And sure enough, a closer look shows that the report was sponsored by the National Campaign Against Toxic Hazards, and that one of its co-authors is Prof. Barry Commoner, the radical anti-technology crusader who blames all ills, alleged or real, on capitalism.

Dioxin, a hydrocarbon, is also present in the exhaust of diesel engines and in fly ash; it is possible that it is produced in all combustion processes. It is a strange substance in that comparatively small amounts are deadly to some animals, but so far no effects have been found in humans who have been heavily exposed to it. That makes it ideal for scaremongering by the "environmentalist" charlatans. (For an authoritative discussion, see Dioxin in the environment its effect on human health, $2 from Amer. Council on SCi. and Health, 47 Maple St., Summit, NJ 07901.)

Commoner, an ex-scientist abusing his academic standing for political activism, waves the dioxin scarecrow to arrive at the inevitable punchline: "waste-burning incinerators [should] be shut down as soon as possible."