Planet Of The Year: Waste A Stinking Mess

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How to handle all this waste? Many countries have made a start by locating and cleaning up acres of landfills and lagoons of liquid waste. But few nations have been able to formulate adequate strategies to control the volume of waste produced. Moreover, there are precious few methods of effective disposal, and each has its own drawbacks. As landfills reach capacity, new sites become scarcer and more expensive. Incinerators, burdensome investments for many communities, also have serious limitations: contaminant-laden ash residue itself requires a dump site. Rising consumer demands for more throwaway packaging add to the volume.

Few developing countries have regulations to control the output of hazardous waste, and even fewer have the technology or the trained personnel to dispose of it. Foreign contractors in many African or Asian countries still build plants without including costly waste-disposal systems. Where new technology is available, it is too often inappropriate. In Lagos, Nigeria, five new incinerator plants stand idle because they can only treat garbage containing less than 20% water; most of the city's garbage is 30% to 40% liquid.

Even in highly industrialized countries, there are formidable social obstacles to waste management: not-in-my-backyard resistance by many communities to new disposal sites and incinerators is all too common. In the U.S. 80% of solid waste is now dumped into 6,000 landfills. Their number is shrinking fast: in the past five years, 3,000 dumps have been closed; by 1993 some 2,000 more will be filled to the brim and shut. "We have a real capacity crunch coming up," said J. Winston Porter, an assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. In West Germany 35,000 to 50,000 landfill sites have been declared potentially dangerous because they may threaten vital groundwater supplies.

What can be done to prevent the world from wallowing in waste? Most important is to reduce trash at its source. At the consumer level, one option is to charge households a garbage-collection fee according to the amount of refuse they produce. Manufacturers too need more prodding. Higher fines, taxes and stricter enforcement might force offending industries to curb waste. Industry must also re-examine its production processes. Such an approach already has a successful track record. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. has cut waste generation in half by using fewer toxic chemicals, separating out wastes that can be reused and substituting alternative raw materials for hazardous substances. 3M's savings last year: an astonishing $420 million. In the Netherlands, Duphar, a large chemical concern, adopted a new manufacturing process that decreased by 95% the amount of waste created in making a pesticide.

Recycling, of course, is perhaps the best-known way to reduce waste. Some countries do it better than others. Japan now recycles more than 50% of its trash, Western Europe around 30%. The U.S. does not fare nearly so well: only 10% of American garbage -- or 16 million tons a year -- is recycled, and only ten states have mandatory recycling laws.