The Impact of Grassroots Challenges to Trash Incinerators in Nigeria
Chapter One
Preamble to the Study
Some waste, however, cannot be decomposed or recycled, and so must be disposed of unaltered. Typically, the waste is buried in landfills or is burned (incineration). These disposal routes have environmental consequences, as they occupy space and can lead to the production of noxious chemicals.
The gases created from decaying waste can influence climate. In past centuries, when Earth’s population was much less, the climatic consequences of waste disposal were negligible. This is not the case in today’s world, particularly with the growth of urban centers. London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mumbai, New York, Los Angeles, Manila, Seoul, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro are some of a longer list of mega-cities whose populations exceed 10 million people. Mega-cities generate mega-trash; 12.1 million tons (11 million metric tons) each day in New York City alone.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
One of the consequences of a modern society is the generation of enormous amounts of waste. The scale of materials use by industrialized countries dwarfs that of a century ago. By 2000 the stock of materials drew from all ninety-two naturally occurring elements in the periodic table compared with just twenty in 1900. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that, in the United States alone, consumption of metal, glass, wood, cement, and chemicals has grown eighteen-fold since 1900 and that the nation accounts for one-third of all materials used throughout the world.
The production and processing of almost any material generates by-products (which may or may not be useful) and releases them to into the air and water. Manufacturing, mining, oil and gas drilling, chemical processing, and coal-burning power plants produce many billions of tons of waste each year. Generation of radioactive and hazardous wastes has grown as society has advanced technologically. Even agriculture generates about a billion tons of waste annually, primarily crop residuals. Finally, residential and commercial generation of municipal solid waste (garbage) is at 230 million tons per year.
So where does it all go? In the past, worries about waste disposal were eased by the apparent ability of the environment (land, air, and water) to absorb that waste. The old saying “out of sight, out of mind” ruled the day. Today, we realize that any type of waste disposal has significant environmental consequences.
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA; PL 94-580), the major federal law on waste disposal, was passed in 1976. Its primary goal was to “protect human health and the environment from the potential hazards of waste disposal.” RCRA is also concerned with reducing the amount of waste generated, ensuring that wastes are managed properly, and conserving natural resources and energy. The RCRA regulates solid waste, hazardous waste, and underground storage tanks containing petroleum products or certain chemicals.
The RCRA definition of solid waste includes garbage and other materials we would ordinarily consider “solid,” as well as sludges, semisolids, liquids, and even containers of gases. These wastes can come from industrial, agricultural, commercial, and residential sources. The RCRA primarily covers hazardous waste, which is only a small part of all waste generated. State and local governments are mainly responsible for passing laws concerning non-hazardous waste, although the federal government will supply money and guidance to local governments so they can better manage their garbage systems.
Other federal laws cover other areas of waste disposal. For example, the Clean Water Act (PL 95-217) regulates wastewater disposal; the Safe Drinking Water Act (PL 93-523) controls underground injections (when wastewater is injected into deep wells); and the Clean Air Act (PL 95-95) governs air pollution.
Prior to the 1970s most industrial waste was dumped in landfills, stored on-site, burned, or discharged to surface waters with little or no treatment. Since the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, industrial waste management follows a hierarchy introduced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (See Figure 4.1.) Source reduction is the preferred method for waste management. This is an activity that prevents the generation of waste initially, for example, a change in operating practices or raw materials. The second choice is recycling, followed by energy recovery. If none of these methods is feasible, then treatment prior to disposal is recommended.
For example, a paper mill that changes its pulping chemicals might reduce the amount of toxic liquid left over after the paper is produced. If that is not possible, perhaps the pulping liquid could be recycled and reused in the process. If not, perhaps the liquid can be burned for fuel to recover energy. If not, and the liquid requires disposal, it should be treated as necessary to reduce its toxicity before being released into the environment.
Industrial waste is categorized based on its relative harm to the environment, chiefly to human health. Most wastes produced by industry are nonhazardous. However, the potential danger from hazardous wastes is so severe that the disposal of such wastes is heavily regulated.
Hazardous Industrial Wastes
Hazardous waste is the inevitable by-product of industrialization. Manufacturers use many chemicals to create their products. Hazardous waste is generated by big industries like automobile and computer manufacturers and by small businesses like neighborhood photo shops and cleaners. Although people can reduce quantities of hazardous waste through careful management, it is not possible to eliminate hazardous residues entirely because of the continual demand for goods.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH DESIN AND METHODOLOGY
How Is Garbage Disposed of Today?
The EPA’s Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures reported that 55.7 percent of MSW goes to land disposal, while 29.7 percent is recovered and 14.7 percent is incinerated. (See Figure 4.7.)
LAND DISPOSAL.
Land disposal includes landfills, land application, and underground injection into deep wells. Landfilling is the most widely used method. Landfills are areas set aside specifically for garbage dumping. There are several types of landfills. In the most common type, garbage is dumped into a large pit and ultimately buried with earth. In land application, waste is taken to a designated area and spread over the surface of the land. Garbage may also be dumped onto a waste pile on the ground where it is stored and may eventually be treated.
Landfills are popular because, when compared with the cost of alternative disposal methods, dumping waste in the ground is a relatively cheap solution to an immediate problem. MSW discards to land disposal grew steadily from the 1960s to the 1980s and then declined through the early 1990s as use of other disposal methods increased. (See Figure 4.8.) However, land disposal rebounded somewhat in the late 1990s before leveling off again in the early 2000s.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATA ANALYSIS AND PRESENTATION
PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT WASTE DISPOSAL
In March 2004 the Gallup Organization conducted its annual poll regarding environmental issues. Participants were asked to express the level of concern they feel about various environmental problems. As shown in Table 4.6 less than half of those asked felt a great deal of concern about the possibility of contamination of soil and water by toxic waste. This percentage has, in general, fallen steadily since its high point of 69 percent in 1989. Nearly as many people (47 percent) felt either a fair amount or a little amount of concern about this problem. A small Waste management is the handling of discarded materials. Recycling and composting, which transform waste into useful products, are forms of waste management. The management of waste also includes disposal, such as landfilling.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
Societies have always had to deal with waste disposal, but what those societies have defined as waste, as well as where would be that waste’s ultimate destination, has varied greatly over time. Large-scale waste disposal is primarily an urban issue because of the waste disposal needs of population concentrations and the material processing and production-type activities that go on in cities. Waste is often defined as “matter out of place” and can be understood as part of a city’s metabolic processes. Cities require materials to sustain their life processes and need to remove wastes resulting from consumption and processing to prevent “nuisance and hazard.” Well into the nineteenth century, many American cities lacked garbage and rubbish collection services. Cities often depended on animals such as pigs, goats, and cows, or even buzzards in southern cities, to consume slops and garbage tossed into the streets by residents. In the middle of the century, health concerns stimulated such larger cities as New York to experiment with collection, often by contracting out. Contractors and municipalities often discarded wastes into near by waterways or placed them on vacant lots on the city fringe.
Rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth century increased the volume of wastes and aroused concern over nuisances and hazards. People had always viewed garbage as a nuisance, but the public-health movement, accompanied by widespread acceptance of anticontagionist theory, emphasized the rapid disposal of organic wastes to prevent epidemics. Concern about potential disease drove municipalities to consider collection, usually by setting up their own services, granting contracts, or allowing householders to make private arrangements. By the late nineteenth century, cities were relying on contractors, although there were shifts between approaches. Cities apparently preferred contracting to municipal operation because of cost as well as the absence of a rationale for government involvement in a domain with many private operators.
During the first half of the twentieth century, municipal control over collection gradually increased to between 60 and 70 percent, largely for health and efficiency reasons. Just as they had moved from private to public provision of water because of concerns over inability of the private sector to protect against fire and illness, cities began to question leaving waste removal to contractors. Contractor collection was often disorganized, with frequent vendor changes, short-term contracts, and contractor reluctance to invest in equipment. Municipal reformers concluded that sanitation was too important to be left to profit-motivated contractors. Initially, responsibility went to departments of public health, but as the germ theory of disease replaced anticontagionism, control over the function shifted to public works departments. Increasingly, cities viewed garbage collection as an engineering rather than a public health problem, and municipal concern shifted from health to fire hazards and the prevention of nuisances such as odors and flies.
Changes in both composition of wastes (or solid wastes, as they were now called) and collection and disposal methods occurred after World War II. A major fraction of municipal solid wastes before the war had been ashes, but as heating oil and natural gas displaced coal, ashes became less important. The solid wastes generated by individuals did not decrease, however, because there were sharp rises in the amount of nonfood materials, such as packaging and glass. Another change occurred in regard to disposal sites. Before the war, cities had disposed of wastes in dumps, on pig farms (a form of recycling), by ocean dumping, or by incineration. A few cities used garbage reduction or composting. For nuisance and health reasons, cities found these methods unacceptable, and in the decades after 1945, they adopted the so-called sanitary landfill method of waste disposal, which involved the systematic placing of wastes in the ground using a technology such as a bulldozer or a bull clam shovel. The sanitary landfill, or tipping, had been widely used in Great Britain before the war. In the late 1930s, Jean Vincenz, director of public works in Fresno, California, had developed it. Vincenz used the sanitary landfill to deal with solid wastes at army camps during the war. Public works and public health professionals and municipal engineers viewed the technique as a final solution to the waste disposal problem. Between 1945 and 1960, the number of fills increased from 100 to 1,400.
A further development, starting in the late 1950s, involved a rise in private contracting. Firms that provided economies of scale, sophisticated management, and efficient collection absorbed smaller companies and replaced municipal operations. Sharp rises in the costs of disposal as well as a desire to shift labor and operating costs to the private sector also played a role. In the 1980s, private contracting grew rapidly because it was the most cost effective method available.
In the 1960s, the environmental movement raised questions about solid-waste disposal and the safety of sanitary landfills, both in terms of the environment and health. In the 1950s, states had strengthened environmental regulations, while the federal government followed with the Solid Waste Act in 1965 and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976. Higher standards for landfills raised costs. Increasingly, society sought disposal methods such as recycling that appeared protective of health and environmentally benign. By the last decade of the twentieth century, as new techniques for utilizing recycled materials and controlling waste generation developed, society seemed on its way to a more sustainable balance.
The tendency of Americans to consume everincreasing amounts of goods, however, has dampened the rate of improvement. For instance, Americans are discarding an increasing number of computers every year. Monitors especially consistitute an environmental danger because they contain lead, mercury, and cadmium. If disposed of in landfills, they may leach these dangerous metals into the soil and groundwater. Therefore, concerned consumers are pushing manufacturers to create collection and recycling programs for outdated equipment.
Nevertheless, recycling programs have not proven the anticipated panacea for problems in solid-waste disposal. Quite simply, the supply of recyclable materials generally outstrips demand. A strong market exists for aluminum cans, but newspaper, plastic, and glass remain less attractive to buyers. For example, removing the ink from newspapers is expensive, and the wood fibers in paper do not stand up well to repeated processing. Thus, just because it is theoretically possible to recycle a material, it does not mean that recycling actually will happen. This difficulty suggests that consumers hoping to limit the amount of material in landfills would do well to buy products with less initial packaging and of materials that recycle easily.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
- Cowans, Jonathan. Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Williams, Paul T. Waste Treatment and Disposal. New York: Wiley, 2005.
Web Sites
- “Waste Management and Climate Change.” Environment Canada, February 20, 2003. <http://www.ec.gc.ca/EnviroZine/english/issues/29/feature1_e.cfm> (accessed November 5, 2007).
- Brian D. Hoyle
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Luton, Larry S. The Politics of Garbage: A Community Perspective on Solid Waste Policy Making. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
- Melosi, Martin V. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
- ———. Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
- Whitaker, Jennifer Seymour. Salvaging the Land of Plenty: Garbage and the American Dream. New York: W. Morrow, 1994.
