Hydrology: A Question of Birthright

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"We are living in our own filth," says John W. Gardner, the new Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. U.S. rivers and streams, like the muddy Missouri, used to be contaminated with nothing worse than silt, some salt, and the acids from mines. Now they are garbage dumps. Raw sewage, scrap paper, ammonia compounds, toxic chemicals, pesticides, oil and grease balls as big as a human fist—these are the unsavory contents of thousands of miles of U.S. waterways.

Industry now pours at least twice as much organic material into U.S. streams as the sewage of all the municipalities combined. Americans who once could be excused a superior attitude about sanitation after traveling abroad, now come home to find that their own drinking water may come from rivers into which steel mills pour pickling liquors, paper mills disgorge wood fibers that decay and use up oxygen, and slaughterhouses dump the blood, fat and stomach contents of animals. Pollution has become such a problem that it is all but impossible to calculate the probable cost of cleaning up the streams. A conservative estimate: at least $40 billion over the next decade.

However large it is, the price, says Gardner, will have to be paid. If the U.S. does not spend the money to control pollution, it will have to spend it finding new sources of water. Only through pollution control can the country safely re-use the water it has. And re-use—or recycling—is something the country already depends on. Before it reaches the Mississippi, for example, the water of the Ohio is used in one way or another a total of 3.7 times.

Telltale Tap Water. The trouble is that such conventional methods of treatment and purification as filtration, dilution and chlorination are unable to cope with some of today's contaminants. Household detergents pass through modern treatment plants with only partial removal. Certain synthetic chemicals, reports the U.S. Public Health Service, can travel hundreds of miles, go through a treatment plant, and still show up in tap water.

One answer to pollution is a scheme that has proved successful in the Ruhr. Flowing through West Germany's most concentrated industrial region, the river remains clean enough for swimming and boating within the shadow of smoke stacks — all because of the Ruhrverband, a cooperative society of 250 municipalities and 2,200 industries along the river. The society gets results with a simple principle: he who pollutes the waters must pay the cost of purification. Carefully calculated assessments have enabled the Verband to build 102 purification plants since 1948, and encourage members to clean up their own wastes. The Ruhr's steel industry has installed water-circulation systems in its plants to use the same water over and over again. As a result, the plants now draw only 2.6 cubic yards of water for the production of one ton of steel, compared with the 130 cubic yards they used in the past.

No such cooperation yet exists in the U.S., where there is no law compelling factories to disclose the amount or type of their wastes and few companies that will volunteer the information. Meanwhile, the need for pollution control be comes daily more obvious.