Waste Management Strategies for a Sustainable Future

To save the planet secrets of the garbage dump Do you know what goes on inside them? A lot of people I talked to began saying, Wow, ten years old? I thought newspapers degraded in a couple of months or a couple of years. Around the world, there are better ways to deal with waste. Recycling. It's big in Japan. Industrial waste. Denmark has a nationwide system. Or, better still, don't produce waste to start with. The best way to waste not, want not. Major funding for Race to Save the Planet is provided by the Annenberg CPB Project and public television viewers. Corporate funding is provided by Ocean Spray. Our continuing aim is to preserve and protect what we cannot create. Additional funding is provided by Jesse Smith Noise Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, and by the following. Are you ready for some amazing numbers? Half a million trees cut down every week just to make the paper for America's Sunday newspapers. Or, here's a good one, a plastic fast food container has a useful life of about 10 minutes, but it'll be around for the next 500 years. Or how about this? Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months. As you've no doubt guessed, this episode of Race to Save the Planet is about waste. all kinds household garbage sewage and industrial waste around the world more and more waste is being generated but at the same time people are thinking up new ways to cope with it there's the story of Japan's recycling of Denmark's nationwide hazardous waste system, of the California factory that's abolished waste altogether, and many others. As you'll see, if we want to clean up our act, there's a lot we can do. This is Fresh Kills, the world's largest garbage dump, politely called a landfill. It's in New York, the largest city in the nation whose citizens produce the most garbage anywhere in the world, about a ton each per year. This mound of garbage will soon be the second highest point on the east coast of the United States. Garbage dumping is an environmental hazard. Every day, at least a million gallons of toxic liquid leak out of the dump into the surrounding bay. Dumped garbage is also a waste of resources. It represents the loss of the raw material and energy it took to manufacture products in the first place. All together the world throws out more than four and a half million tons of garbage every day. I mean, that stuff looks half biodegraded, but it degraded already. For the last 15 years, a team of archaeologists has been examining modern America through what it throws out. This strange study, they call it garbology, can reveal our basic attitudes towards resources. Garbologist Bill Rathje. Garbage is a way of defining a society in terms of resource management. What people consider valuable and what they consider stuff that they want to throw away. Everybody is wasteful. ...household throws away 15% of the solid food that they buy. Why don't you make something with rotten banana skins? But this kind of wastefulness is by no means global. The quantity and variety of garbage that Rathji and his students handle is peculiar to wealthy countries. it's almost full the first thing you learn is it's only really affluent societies like ourselves that can afford to throw a lot of garbage away and it's only societies like our ourselves that can afford to look at garbage as a problem for most third world countries latin america south america the middle east most of these countries garbage is a valuable resource you Go to a garbage disposal site and you'll see all sorts of people picking it over. You'll see people collecting bits of metal, bits of textiles, bottles, etc. It's something that they use as a valuable... commodity, a way to support their lives. In Lima, Peru, for example, officially condoned scavengers search for these valuable commodities to sell to the city. It's a way for poor people to make a living. But it also makes environmental sense. In rich countries, it's called recycling. Yet in many rich countries, recycling like this is a rarity. Here, 100,000 residents of a San Francisco suburb separate bottles, cans, and paper ready for collection. As landfilling becomes harder, recycling will have to increase. But for the family business that services this area, it's nothing new. Back in the 30s, when America was not so rich, Joe Garbarino's relatives collected garbage and made use of much of it. They weren't recyclables then. They were what we called stoku. And stoku was a word, was an offshoot of stock. And it was stock dividends. There were no stock dividends unless you picked up bottles, cans, and papers. Although for centuries, recycling was the rule throughout Europe and America. Just in the last few decades, new wealth has created a throwaway society. But today, as disposal costs skyrocket, Garbarino is finding new markets for many of his recovered materials. materials. Paper goes to Asia for reprocessing. Glass goes to a local plant where it's remelted. Scrap iron and tin also go to Asia. This metal may return to the United States incorporated into new cars. Aluminum is sold internationally. Yard waste is first processed on site. Some fuels the boilers at a local paper mill. The rest is sold as fertilizer. For Joe Garbarino, recycling is great. good business, but he understands the environmental benefits as well. You save an awful lot of energy in recycling because when you melt, for instance, glass down, it's two-thirds the energy that it takes to melt sand and turn sand into glass instead of heating glass, melting it, and turning that. The energy savings alone there are tremendous on a nationwide basis. And this is the same with aluminum. You would have to go to foreign countries and get five tons of bauxite. which is dirt, bring it here, turn that into one ton of aluminum. So by recycling your aluminum right back into aluminum, you save an awful lot of energy. And it's the same with the paper. Taking 17 mature pulp trees out of a forest, bringing them in to make one ton of newspaper, and in the meantime, nationally and worldwide, we're getting these particular materials and putting them into a hole in the ground and putting dirt over it. It's criminal. Although recycling makes such obvious sense, the American tax system takes the opposite view. In the nation that consumes the most resources in the world, a series of subsidies encourages activities like logging and mining. Recycling in the United States is a great way to save money. enjoys no such benefit. One of the biggest problems is that the government is still subsidizing the people that ship virgin materials. They're giving them a tax break. And they're not giving it to those of us in the recycling business that are taking that same product that was virgin, reuse now, called recycling, we're shipping it back to be reused, and we're not getting any tax breaks on that. Joe Garbarino is a recycling enthusiast. He feeds his herd of prize-winning pigs undiscarded food. Overall, he recycles 25% of his area's garbage, vastly more than America as a whole, which only recycles 10%. But in theory, 80% recycling is possible, although this will never be achieved without substantial government encouragement. How are you doing today? Come on. Biggie, The world's garbage dumps are filled with untapped resources. But in recent years, they've also become littered with wrappers and packages in unprecedented amounts. On the store shelves all over America, Reynolds foil packaging and labels possess unequal selling and protection magic. Packaging was the miracle of American marketing. Use it once, then throw it away. Recycling was never intended. The mix of materials made it impossible anyway. Packaging took advantage of the synthetic materials produced by the post-war petrochemical industry. Materials designed to be indestructible. Can you tear it? It's almost impossible. Does it dry out, get brittle, the chip peel or crack? Forty years later, American industry is beginning to sell a new packaging vision. EnviroPacks, they call this one. Now they're pitching environmental values. So here's the deal, and it's a big deal. I promise to clean up my room. If, big if, you promise to clean up your act too. See these? They're EnviroPaks. Use them to refill your old bottles. They're made of a whole lot less plastic, so you've got a whole lot less to throw away, which is cool, environmentally speaking. The thin EnviroPaks, here being test marketed. in Canada use less plastic, and the packaging itself is designed for easier recycling. The heavy plastic container is meant to be refilled many times. It's a partial return to older habits. Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer, calculates that less packaging will save money for them and the consumer, and they're hoping that the lack of convenience will be outweighed by customers'environmental concern. Company executive Doug Moser. We think so. Solid waste is a real issue in society, and as a responsible member of society, we think we need to do our part to reduce it. I could also say it's a business opportunity. We think by being first in the market with this EnviroPak, we're going to gain competitive advantage versus our major competitors and gain market share. So I guess I would put them together and call it enlightened self-interest. If all the plastic containers on the supermarket shelf were replaced by environmentally friendly versions, it would indeed help relieve the pressure on landfills. But by how much? Excavating landfills is one way to find out, and that's what archaeologist Bill Rathje and his team are doing here in Sunnyvale, California. Contrary to popular opinion, he finds that the plastics are less of a problem than other things. Plastic is really a very small portion of landfills. It's about 5% by weight, not much more than that by volume when you consider that almost all of it is squashed. Newspapers, on the other hand, are 10% to 16% of landfills by both weight and volume. They're the largest single identifiable commodity in landfills. Thanks for watching. For anyone but an archaeologist, there's another surprise about those newspapers. October 7th, 1965. When I first started digging landfills, it wasn't very surprising to me that we found newspapers that were 10 years old. I mean, archaeologists have dug up paper that's 2,000 years old. But a lot of people I talked to began saying, wow, 10 years old? I thought newspapers degraded in a couple of months or a couple of years. So we began... realizing that in people's minds there's sort of a mythology that newspapers will biodegrade very rapidly. Phone book! Phone book. Pianos. Landscape. Draperies. Truth, justice, the American way, and phone books. Could the garbage in landfills be made to decay? Rasche sends samples to Jean Bogner, a geologist who's working to identify ideal landfill conditions. She compares the effects of adding new elements like bacteria. To date, the single most influential additive has been water. What's interesting here is that we have five bottles, and in each of the bottles we put 25 grams of landfill refuse from the same sample, from the same depth, from the same landfill. And the only difference between what went in these bottles was the amount of moisture we added. You can see the tremendous difference in the degree of decomposition between the sample which had no additional moisture and the sample which had 100 milliliters of additional moisture. Moisture may work in the laboratory, but in real landfills it creates its own problems. As it percolates down, it picks up inks, paint, and other chemicals from the garbage. The result is called leachate, a toxic liquid that leaks out, contaminating streams and groundwater. But leachate can be controlled. simply lining the landfill with huge sheets of rubber like this. It's a common practice in many industrial countries, only recently made compulsory in the United States. And well-designed landfills can even yield benefits. The benefits can be seen in Gene Bogner's decomposing garbage samples. As the garbage breaks down, it produces methane gas, which can be drawn off. That means that garbage dumps are potential energy sources. This site receives 13,000 tons of Los Angeles garbage a day. It's America's largest modern landfill, and the world's largest producer of methane from garbage. The landfill's earth covering is peppered with collection pipes, which channel the gas to an on-site power plant. The landfill is fully lined, so the operators can encourage decomposition by adding moisture, in this case, sewage sludge. Disposal costs are ten times less here than elsewhere, because the power plant generates one percent of Los Angeles'electricity, enough for 100,000 local homes. Although America produces more methane this way than any other country, garbage remains an essentially untapped resource. Jean Bogner. It represents a very cheap source of energy for us if we care to tap it. At the present time... there are about 70 commercial landfill gas facilities across the United States. Now, that's still a relatively small percentage, considering we have perhaps some 9,000 landfills in existence in this country. This is newspaper recycling in Japan. It's a long-established practice here, and it shows an attitude to resources quite different from the United States. It's called tissue paper exchange, for the token rolls of toilet paper given out. Japan, an island nation, used to be careful with resources. But now, with increasing wealth, attitudes are changing. People favor virgin materials, and the exchange rate encourages. imports. So, as America recycles more, Japan recycles less, showing that economic forces are often stronger than environmental values. Company president Matsuzawa. The tissue paper exchange business is not doing well now. For example, because of the yen dollar exchange rate, America's economy is not doing well. American recycled paper and pulp are inexpensive when imported to Japan. So naturally, the price I get for my paper keeps going down. Since 1985, half the paper recyclers in Tokyo have closed. Increasing wealth has brought more than American recycled paper to Japan. Fast food and the disposable society have arrived with a vengeance. The The amount of garbage is rapidly increasing, but so are imaginative ways of dealing with it. This popular public garden, built on a landfill in Tokyo Bay, is one answer to what the government's chief solid waste scientist, Masuro Tanaka, sees as the new throwaway Japan. My mother always taught me material is very important. Everything is coming from God. And all... Oil is coming from outside, so deal with material carefully. But nowadays, young people are rich and enjoy every day. So, very wasteful. These are sanitation workers in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo. They run a waste management program considered a model for all of Japan. Maybe even the world. One of the secrets of their success is their active solicitation of community interest in waste. Today's parade announces a battery collection day later in the month. Batteries are recognized as too toxic to throw away with other trash. The engineer behind the program, a true visionary of garbage, is Takeyuki Yoshida, and he's given himself a catchy stage name. In Machida, residents are asked to divide their garbage into five categories. Today, they bring only organics, like food waste to the collection point. Waste number one always attends. To encourage cooperation from the people, I ask them deeply from the bottom of my heart to work together. That is why I bow. So each citizen of Machida must join in considering what waste really is, so that they can appreciate waste as a resource and can recognize that waste should be reused. Let's recycle. Let's start a culture from here. I want Machida to be a cradle of waste recycling culture. The MRC, the Machida Recycling Center, is headquarters for the waste management program. It's a community center, a place for school trips and adult education classes. There's even a daycare program for the town's handicapped. Here, waste no more. Waste number one makes education a priority. Sensible waste management, he says, must become second nature. Waste types must be separated to be recycled. Toxic items like batteries that contain mercury need special handling. Bottles can be reused directly. The key idea is that good waste management is systematic. Separate some, recycle some. If that's done right, the rest can be successfully handled way that would shock many non-Japanese. They incinerate the rest, organics, soiled paper, and light plastics. It's called integrated waste management, common in Europe and Japan, but unknown in America. At Machida, the incinerator is run meticulously, as it has to be, to work correctly. The furnace is constantly monitored and adjusted to suit the particular waste composition. Mistakes can lead to unacceptably high levels of pollutant emissions, in spite of the fact that the... plant is fitted with stacked scrubbers. But, as waste number one explains, toxic emissions like dioxins or heavy metals are avoided because the materials that would generate them are never allowed to reach the incinerator in the first place. American incinerators aren't this good, according to Alan Hershkowitz, an expert in incinerator technology. Basically the facilities that burn garbage in the United States are classic industrial giants. They are filthy, they're noisy, To some extent, they're smelly. They're not the kind of facilities that we see in Japan where they are literally clean enough to take third-grade schoolchildren through them. In fact, visiting garbage-burning facilities in Japan, you have to take your shoes off and put on slippers and put on white gloves so you don't get the facilities dirty. Incinerators have a bad name in America, but it's not because they don't work. It's because they have never been run properly. These technologies can achieve their optimal removal efficiencies for all the pollutants of concern only under very precise operating protocol. Unfortunately, the... workers required, the kind of worker training required to operate these facilities at those levels of efficiency doesn't exist in the United States. One result is that nobody wants an incinerator in their... backyard. Integrated waste management programs are hard to adopt in America as protests mount over badly run facilities. Our gardens don't produce like they used to. And I do think that we're, a lot of this, the particulates that are dropping onto our ground, and they're going to be there forever. We want clean air. We don't want something that's going to put any more into it. We just have to learn to say no and let them know we mean it. All American waste is man-made. systematically including both recycling and incineration protests like these will continue the biggest problem are the incinerators because they fight for this waste useless films and plastics that are not recyclable don't need to be part of the waste stream these things go up in smoke and they're a major contributor to the acid rain problem what we're doing in the United States is we're taking non combustible materials like glass and metals we're taking recyclable materials like like paper and plastics, and we're throwing them into furnaces. Nine US industry of substantial resources and we're giving US citizens a lot of reason to scream and yell about the development of garbage burning facilities that are going to undermine recycling and cause toxic air emissions. part of Machida's waste management system is not even contemplated in America. The toxic incinerator ash is stabilized with cement, forming pellets. The pellets are then landfilled, where they'll provide a stable base for for a future park or golf course. Finally, Machida's landfill, like all in Japan, is of course lined, and any leachate produced is channeled off to a treatment plant. To Masaru Tanaka, expensive processes like these are unavoidable. We have to minimize the pollutions, so we can't consider that it's too expensive or economic. Japanese choices, this is solution, no other choice. Clean water sustaining a field of lotus plants is the end product of the lychee purification system. It's an astute demonstration of Machida's waste management success. Like everything else here, it's the brainchild of waste number one, designed to help the community accept their incinerators. Japan's most striking example of reaping benefits from garbage is the Tokyo Bay landfill. New York has fresh kills. Tokyo has this. The gardens, pool and gymnasium are heated by the world's third largest incinerator. Japan's waste management works, socially and environmentally. So combining of recycling and installation, material recovery and energy recovery, that both together, that is future waste management policy in Japan. Waste management has not always been a success in Japan. In the 1970s, there were even violent protests, but involving a different kind of waste. For more than a decade, dumping by the Chiso Chemical Company had caused hundreds of deaths and crippled thousands. This notorious tragedy was one of the first clear cases of human disease from industrial toxic waste contamination. The victims suffered nervous system damage, which in some cases was passed on to children. Minamata disease, as it came to be called, was caused by methylmercury discharged into Minamata Bay. The poison became concentrated in the marine life, eaten locally. Today, with the mercury still in the bay, there's a joint effort by the government and the company to dredge the seafloor. Fishing is no longer allowed, but the ban is not easy to enforce. So authorities are collecting and grinding contaminated fish. The resulting pulp is stored in tanks because no way has yet been found to dispose of the of this toxic legacy. The Minamata poisonings were followed by toxic waste disasters in many parts of the globe. Lekkerkerk in Holland and Love Canal in America are two on a long list of communities hit by the new scourge of the industrial world. Most countries have responded with effective regulations, none more than in the United States, as Joel Hirshhorn, a congressional advisor on hazardous waste, explains. The regulatory system we have in place today, with its criminal penalties, has made large corporations very, very sensitive to the possibility of creating the love canals of the future. Big corporations want to avoid cleanup. costs which can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars just for one location. So the regulatory system will prevent the creation of many future love canals. But the regulatory system is never perfect. One problem with regulation is it needs vigilant enforcement. This Los Angeles police unit regularly checks sewers for surreptitious dumping. The first environmental crime strike force in the world. It has already sent 50 executives to jail for these newly recognized offenses. Chief Prosecutor John Lynch. At first blush, an environmental crime may not seem as serious as, for example, a robbery or a murder. But if you look at the impact on society as a whole, if you take something like a toxic cloud, contamination of a groundwater supply, that makes a single act of murder even pale because the murder has one victim. And you may extend that to the immediate ...family, and you may talk about some hypothetical damage to society that a murderer exists and this violent act has occurred. But if you talk about contamination of a groundwater supply or poisoning the air, you can be talking about affecting thousands of people. for 10 or 20 or 30 years, that's a significant violent act against the society as a whole. And it is a crime. The strike force has to cope with thousands of industries which handle an enormous variety of hazardous materials. But it's hard to know exactly what goes on down there. So this can never be the perfect solution to industrial waste problems. It has become very expensive to do things correctly, to dispose of hazardous waste and to treat it or to recycle it. And as a consequence of that, I think you see an awful lot of mid-sized to small businesses that try to cut corners economically that violate the criminal law. There is an entirely different way to approach industrial waste and it's worked successfully here in Denmark for 20 years. This is one of a national network of 21 government-run collection points for hazardous waste. Every factory has one within 30 miles. The only obligation to make the delivery and report the contents. Although to be safe, are always taken for analysis. From here, the government ships the waste to a central treatment plant. The whole point is to make treatment as easy as dumping. This remarkable treatment scheme, probably the world's best best hazardous waste handling system has been running successfully for 20 years. It was sensible environmental thinking, not a Danish love canal, that inspired the program. Denmark's hazardous waste ends up in the small town of Nyborg. Twenty years ago, local residents did not object to the idea. Nowadays, with so much more known about industrial waste, perhaps they would. But they can take comfort in the fact that the nearby plant has run as well as it could possibly be. When each shipment arrives, its contents are already known. That makes the first rule of hazardous waste treatment easy to follow. Different materials must be kept separate and handled individually, just like the garbage management in Japan. Discarded drugs are included. Consumers simply have to return them to any pharmacy for them to end up here. The same applies to batteries and other household hazardous waste. Waste containing toxic heavy metals is chemically treated to... produce a concentrated solid. This will be stored in a lined landfill, carefully mapped to allow later recovery. Manufacturers have to pay for their share of these expensive processes, so they've learned that waste treatment is a a real cost. Program manager Per Rehman. PER REHMAN, In the beginning, many industries tend to forget that waste is costing money, and therefore they forgot about including the calculation in their calculation for the products that there is something called waste fees. Now, we have tried to change that so that it's not quite a normal part of their calculation that it's going in on equal level as water, labor, housing and all that. Organics like pesticides, waste oil and paint go to the incinerators. Like Japan, they're properly run and the emissions are scrubbed so air pollution is negligible. And like Japan, the local people benefit. Half the town gets its home heating this way. And a new incinerator could soon provide electricity. Here the philosophy is that a well- well-run incinerator offers the least environmentally offensive solution to a problem that's not going to go away. By using incineration, you are transferring the organics to water, principal water and carbon. dioxide by putting it on a landfill it's just postponing the whole thing 20-30 years so that our children can have the pleasure to deal with it in the future. Incineration inevitably produces toxic ash, which must be landfilled, as in Japan. So even this well-run treatment system is not ideal. Far better is not to generate waste in the first place. And around the world, that's beginning to happen. to happen. Literally, you can walk through any industrial activity, look around and use common sense and see ways to immediately cut the generation of waste. And lots of chemical companies, what people have been doing, for example, is seeing how they use water. Enormous quantities of water are used to clean chemical equipment. that dirty water becomes toxic waste. If they use less water, or if they replace water with mechanical techniques, ultrasound techniques, or just different subtle ways of cleaning equipment, they can immediately cut down on the generation of liquid hazardous waste. Reducing waste at the source can be seen in action at this California factory, Aero Scientific, one of America's top ten printed circuit board makers. Despite its clean image, this is not a clean industry. It uses extremely toxic materials. The boards themselves are etched with acids, dissolving heavy metals in the process. Where before, the metal and acid mixtures would have gone down the same path. the sewer. Here, a recycling system neutralizes the acids, purifies 90% of the water for return to the plant, and recovers different metals for reuse or for sale as scrap. The system makes economic, environmental, and environmental decisions. and even managerial sense. Company president, Sam Hughes. Having the system allows us not to create the waste in the first place. It allows us to, it's easier to manage. If it runs that good, it's self-contained, we don't have spills, we don't have as much potential for spills. It's just easier to manage. We can spend our time doing other things instead of wrestling with that problem every day. Waste reduction works well in this industry. In others, it may not. But for the idea to spread... government intervention will be needed. Joel Hirschhorn. Government has to make up its mind. Whether we want industry to spend its money in the old-fashioned way, where they keep building end-of-pipe facilities to deal with the waste that they indeed produce, or does government want industry to spend its money on inventing and using clean technology so it doesn't produce pollution, so industry doesn't need the incinerators and the landfills and all the other facilities that deal with waste. That's a fundamental public policy view that quite has not been reconciled in the United States. As developing countries industrialize, they too generate environmental pollution, from car exhaust to toxic waste. The second. The sad truth is that high-tech waste treatment systems are often beyond the reach of these countries. In the last 50 years, Lima, Peru has swelled from 600,000 to a population of 7 million. Even basic services have been cut down. have not kept up. In the cluster of shanty towns that surround the urban center, garbage collection is not readily available. Water is not piped to most of the city. Instead, a water truck visits the barrio daily. The amount delivered to each family is a mere half gallon per person per day to cover everything from washing to drinking. In an industrialized city, country one person uses 50 times as much. Most of Lima's sewage is discharged untreated into the Pacific Ocean through a series of open sewers snaking through the area. One sewer passes through Acapulco, a shanty town on the coast which its founders hoped would one day be as attractive as the Mexican resort. This Acapulco sewer joins up with a major drain nearby. The drain runs through one of the few open spaces available as a playground. In spite of the serious health hazard, local children find the water irresistible. Town councillor, Justino Torres Rio. The children swim in this water, especially in the summer, because they don't have access to the ocean. The consequence of this contamination is the spread of typhoid, scabies and funguses, all kinds of illnesses. We have gone to the authorities, but so far we have not found solutions. In contrast, most industrial countries treat their sewage using complicated plants like this. It's a typical installation using an array of chemicals and a battery of tanks, pipes and pumps. When it comes in, the raw sewage is first held in settling tanks, normally kept covered to minimize both health and safety. health risks and smell. 62 million gallons of sewage a day are handled here, from a town of about half a million. The standard treatment process is explained by engineering professor Bob Gerhardt. The first phase of conventional wastewater treatment is primary treatment. It's a physical process relying on gravity. The solids are separated from the liquid. The liquid goes on to subsequent treatment. The solids are taken on to methane digestion. fermentation process. The digester tanks greatly speed up natural processes, which use microorganisms to break down waste, like on the bottom of a pond, for example. Most of the sludge produced in the tanks is then discarded in a landfill. Meanwhile, these aeration units handle the liquid part of the sewage. This mimics another natural process in which other microorganisms consume dissolved organic material. Then, once the the microorganisms have been removed, secondary treatment, as this is called, is complete. At the end of secondary treatment, there is a physical process called a secondary clarifier. In this process, those beneficial microorganisms are settled, recycled, and reused in the aeration unit. As you can see, the water is pretty clean at this point. In the United States and most of the developed world, this would be considered the end of wastewater treatment. Most places chlorinate the water just before discharge, but here they use more chemicals and filtration in an additional treatment stage. It produces a waste liquid close to drinking water standards. High-tech treatment like this is effective, if you can afford it. But it's energy and chemical intensive. And like garbage dumping, it wastes resources which sewage could provide. And it's beyond the means of two-thirds of the world. as Bob Gerhardt, who advises developing countries on the subject, has discovered. It's uncommon to find waste treatment in developing countries because it's unaffordable to begin with. Part of the reason it's unaffordable... is that the technologies that are being transferred by development organizations from various countries in the world and the engineers who are asked to implement those projects are totally inappropriate. They involve technologies that are expensive to build and expensive to operate and maintain. But in one section of Lima, there's a sewage treatment system which offers none of these disadvantages. Based on this network of ponds, locally built and operated, it serves 100,000 people. The initial step is identical to the high-tech plant. Simple screening out of objects that can't be biologically treated. But here, the similarity ends. The sewage is channeled to ponds, in which two processes will happen. The solids fall to the bottom, where in the same pond they'll slowly decompose. It's like combining the settling tanks and digester at the high-tech system in one location. The liquid moves on to ponds, where algae grow. If conditions are maintained correctly, the natural photosynthesis will not only consume organic materials, but also produce wide changes in acidity, or pH. That's as good as chlorination, as manager Hugo Nava explains. The photosynthesis that needs sand will produce oxygen and consume CO2 during the day. During the night, it will release again the CO2 in the water. This consumption I'm releasing of CO2 will create a wide range of pH that could go from 10 during the day to 6 during the night. This variation in pH kills the bacteria and is the way we purify the water. After 20 days, the water is safe to reuse. So, recently, they've added a third set of ponds to raise fish. Remaining organic nutrients support the growth of plants which feed a hardy species called tilapia. Doce cinco. Quince nueve. By using a fish that can consume the phytoplankton that is produced in the tertiary pond, we can obtain a product that could be valuable for the community in terms of money or in terms of protein. Nutrient-rich treated sewage not used for fish farming goes to irrigate the desert. Low rainfall is the main reason for the drought. Here has driven some people to order their crops with untreated sewage. But around the treatment ponds, there is now a much healthier alternative. Treated sewage wastewater was used to raise this corn crop. It will support a cattle herd which provides food and brings in cash. For the local people, the treatment ponds are a success on several levels. First, they provide an essential service for safeguarding health. Second, by reducing pollution of the Pacific, locally caught seafood is safer to eat. Above all, waste has become a resource. But in spite of such advantages, this system has not been widely adopted. There is suspicion of low-tech methods the world over. This is Arcata, in California. Suspicion of low-tech is as strong in the United States as anywhere. But in this town, alternatives are a way of life. Good morning, Arcata! Welcome to Flush with Pride here on the Waterfront. days. Hope you enjoy the great weather and all the good times. Fifteen years ago, when strict clean water laws came out, Arcata was cited as a polluter of Humboldt Bay. The state encouraged participation in a regional high-tech treatment scheme. Something had to be done, not least to protect the area's valuable oysters. But Arcata was concerned about expense and disruption. Today the solution can be seen in 94 acres of newly created wetlands that lie between the town and the bay. These marshes provide low-tech sewage treatment so and popular that people here say they flush with pride. Like Peru, it's brought many benefits. Bob Gerhardt helped design the system. The area that we're standing on right now was an open dump that received all of the county solid waste. waste for a period of about 10 years up until 1973. At that time it was closed out by taking muds from the bay and putting it on top and it's caused this elevated platform that we're on which we refer to as Mount Trishmore. Treatment begins at the edge of the marsh. In a perfect illustration of low-tech suspicion, state authorities required that primary treatment, settling and digesting solids, be done with this conventional equipment. although Bob Gerhard insists the marshes could easily do the job. So the first unconventional stage is these oxidation ponds. As in Peru, they use algal growth to consume organic material and kill off pathogens. City engineer David Hull. We take samples fairly often from all these ponds to see how the treatment process is going and make sure that we're achieving the standard we need to. This water then is as treated as the oxidation ponds will treat the wastewater. You can see there's a lot of suspended solids in there, not much clarity at all. Next, at the point where the Peruvian wastewater would feed fish and water crops, Arcadia's marshes come into play. First, the community of organisms that grow on the stems that are submerged in the marsh, there's bacteria and fungus and algae cells and things like that. They will actually grow on the marsh. grab onto suspended material as it moves through and acts as a physical filter. Another process that wetlands do for us to make the water cleaner is they have this ability to absorb nutrients. Now nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus are essential to the plant's growth and in fact when they're absorbed in the plant tissue they'll make it grow bigger and better. That's why people fertilize their lawns and stuff. But these nutrients, these same nutrients, had they not been taken out can in some cases become a pollution problem. problem. As in Peru, marsh treatment needs several weeks, but the results are remarkably good. This is below our standard, and so this would be adequate for discharge to the bay. There are times of the year that this is actually fairly clear. It almost looks like tap water coming out of here. It does vary seasonally, but as long as we can keep it below our discharge requirements, then it's a success. Once through the marsh, the water is pumped into Humboldt Bay, where the oysters are thriving. The marsh itself has become an Audubon bird sanctuary, and there's a constant stream of enthusiasts from across the state. Most of the visitors have probably no idea that their beautiful natural surroundings are, in fact, a sewage treatment plant. Arcata's system is cheap to build and run. The only problem is space. It needs many times the area that a high-tech system uses. But Bob Gerhard is convinced that there's no city where appropriate land could not be found. People are skeptical of doing something like this on a large scale. This is Arcata, a small community. A community the size of... 8 million people, for example, would require something like 2,000 to 3,000 acres to do this. You might say there's no wetlands available to do this. Well, in fact, there probably is. There's degraded saltwater marshes, degraded industrial and commercial property that could be used for this purpose. Sewage treatment, bird sanctuary, and now the former town dump is about to yield another bonus. The city of Arcata has found other resources associated with the cattails and bulrushes that grow in these wetlands. For example, the lower parts of the cattail and the tubers, the root structure, at this time of year is full of starch. as these plants start to store for the winter. This starch can be converted to ethanol, and that ethanol can be used to mix with gasoline to form gasohol. The city is proposing that project, and the city council has voted money to start the first step in the project to use the cattails from the marsh to supply gasohol to the police cars. Marsh treatment is not fully trusted. The state still insists on chlorinating the wastewater. Unnecessarily, according to Bob Gerhardt. The world is very skeptical of low-tech solutions. That comes from several points of view. Engineers, for the most part, are more comfortable designing systems that they can control externally. Administrative people and regulatory people would rather have something that's been proven, at least in terms of process control. So the combination of regulatory administrative people and engineers not trusting low-tech technology has really hurt the development and the technology transfer of these types of systems. I think that's changing, though. It's changing because of the resource constraint of not having an infinite amount of money and an infinite amount of chemicals and energy to spend on these kinds of projects. Resource constraints are one stimulus for sensible waste management, like using sewage or recycling garbage. But these new ways of thinking are essential for a more basic reason. The Earth, after all, is a closed system. There's no such place as away. That's why all attempts to bury waste in the ground, dump it in the ocean, or over the border, are environmental disasters. But today, the throwaway society carries on, regardless. According to archaeologist Bill Rathje, It may be time to learn the lesson of history. Garbage doesn't come out of thin air. For garbage, you have to have consumers and consumerism. You have to have the people that procure the resources and manufacture them. process them and distribute them and you have to have the consumers that go out and purchase them and use them and then throw the remnants away most of the societies that archaeologists have found most fascinating are the societies that were the super consumers of the past egypt with all its gold and jewels the huge tombs at tikal and the big temples the huge city of teotihuacan in mexico where you've got huge palaces and murals and lavish displays of the artifacts, the resources of the society. The societies that were affluent were the biggest producers of garbage. And these are the societies that I think have real lessons for us, because we are in the same boat. And what happened to them? Well, these societies used and used and used until all of a sudden they found out resources were in short supply. At that point, they recycled, they reused, they were very conscious of resource allocation. But it was usually too little too late, and the society fell apart. We're going to have to become, in our society, efficient in our resource use, because if we get to the point where we're forced into it, we'll face the same answer. as all the other civilizations. Right now, how we handle our household waste in America is changing fast. Last year, 500 towns started up recycling programs because it saves on dumping costs. So there's a good chance it won't take much to persuade your town to do the same. Everybody wins. The town saves money, we all save resources, and the environment is better off. Please join me next time for Race to Save the Planet. Major funding for Race to Save the Planet is provided by the Annenberg CPB Project and public television viewers. Corporate funding is provided by Ocean Spray. Our continuing aim is to preserve and protect what we cannot create. Additional funding is provided by Jesse Smith Noise Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, and by the following. For more information on the College Telecourse, video cassettes, off-air videotaping, and books based on the series, call 1-800-LEARNER. This is PBS. The Global Ecology Handbook, published by Beacon Press, is available for $16.95 plus shipping. A transcript of this program is available for $5. Please call 1-800-TALK-SHOW or send a check to Race to Save the Planet, Journal Graphics, 267 Broadway, New York, New York, 10007. Next on Race to Save the Planet, what does the environment mean to different people? In Zimbabwe, it's pressure on the land. In Thailand, the breakneck pace of growth. In Sweden, coping with the modern world. Watch It Needs Political Decisions, next time on Race to Save the Planet.

Around the world, there are better ways to deal with waste. Recycling. It's big in Japan. Industrial waste.

Denmark has a nationwide system. Or, better still, don't produce waste to start with. The best way to waste not, want not.

Additional funding is provided by Jesse Smith Noise Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, and by the following. Are you ready for some amazing numbers? Half a million trees cut down every week just to make the paper for America's Sunday newspapers. Or, here's a good one, a plastic fast food container has a useful life of about 10 minutes, but it'll be around for the next 500 years.

Or how about this? Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months. As you've no doubt guessed, this episode of Race to Save the Planet is about waste. all kinds household garbage sewage and industrial waste around the world more and more waste is being generated but at the same time people are thinking up new ways to cope with it there's the story of Japan's recycling of Denmark's nationwide hazardous waste system, of the California factory that's abolished waste altogether, and many others. As you'll see, if we want to clean up our act, there's a lot we can do.

This is Fresh Kills, the world's largest garbage dump, politely called a landfill. It's in New York, the largest city in the nation whose citizens produce the most garbage anywhere in the world, about a ton each per year. This mound of garbage will soon be the second highest point on the east coast of the United States.

Garbage dumping is an environmental hazard. Every day, at least a million gallons of toxic liquid leak out of the dump into the surrounding bay. Dumped garbage is also a waste of resources. It represents the loss of the raw material and energy it took to manufacture products in the first place. All together the world throws out more than four and a half million tons of garbage every day.

I mean, that stuff looks half biodegraded, but it degraded already. For the last 15 years, a team of archaeologists has been examining modern America through what it throws out. This strange study, they call it garbology, can reveal our basic attitudes towards resources.

Garbologist Bill Rathje. Garbage is a way of defining a society in terms of resource management. What people consider valuable and what they consider stuff that they want to throw away. Everybody is wasteful.

...household throws away 15% of the solid food that they buy. Why don't you make something with rotten banana skins? But this kind of wastefulness is by no means global.

The quantity and variety of garbage that Rathji and his students handle is peculiar to wealthy countries. it's almost full the first thing you learn is it's only really affluent societies like ourselves that can afford to throw a lot of garbage away and it's only societies like our ourselves that can afford to look at garbage as a problem for most third world countries latin america south america the middle east most of these countries garbage is a valuable resource you Go to a garbage disposal site and you'll see all sorts of people picking it over. You'll see people collecting bits of metal, bits of textiles, bottles, etc. It's something that they use as a valuable... commodity, a way to support their lives.

In Lima, Peru, for example, officially condoned scavengers search for these valuable commodities to sell to the city. It's a way for poor people to make a living. But it also makes environmental sense. In rich countries, it's called recycling. Yet in many rich countries, recycling like this is a rarity.

Here, 100,000 residents of a San Francisco suburb separate bottles, cans, and paper ready for collection. As landfilling becomes harder, recycling will have to increase. But for the family business that services this area, it's nothing new. Back in the 30s, when America was not so rich, Joe Garbarino's relatives collected garbage and made use of much of it.

They weren't recyclables then. They were what we called stoku. And stoku was a word, was an offshoot of stock.

And it was stock dividends. There were no stock dividends unless you picked up bottles, cans, and papers. Although for centuries, recycling was the rule throughout Europe and America. Just in the last few decades, new wealth has created a throwaway society. But today, as disposal costs skyrocket, Garbarino is finding new markets for many of his recovered materials.

materials. Paper goes to Asia for reprocessing. Glass goes to a local plant where it's remelted. Scrap iron and tin also go to Asia. This metal may return to the United States incorporated into new cars.

Aluminum is sold internationally. Yard waste is first processed on site. Some fuels the boilers at a local paper mill. The rest is sold as fertilizer. For Joe Garbarino, recycling is great.

good business, but he understands the environmental benefits as well. You save an awful lot of energy in recycling because when you melt, for instance, glass down, it's two-thirds the energy that it takes to melt sand and turn sand into glass instead of heating glass, melting it, and turning that. The energy savings alone there are tremendous on a nationwide basis. And this is the same with aluminum.

You would have to go to foreign countries and get five tons of bauxite. which is dirt, bring it here, turn that into one ton of aluminum. So by recycling your aluminum right back into aluminum, you save an awful lot of energy.

And it's the same with the paper. Taking 17 mature pulp trees out of a forest, bringing them in to make one ton of newspaper, and in the meantime, nationally and worldwide, we're getting these particular materials and putting them into a hole in the ground and putting dirt over it. It's criminal.

Although recycling makes such obvious sense, the American tax system takes the opposite view. In the nation that consumes the most resources in the world, a series of subsidies encourages activities like logging and mining. Recycling in the United States is a great way to save money.

enjoys no such benefit. One of the biggest problems is that the government is still subsidizing the people that ship virgin materials. They're giving them a tax break.

And they're not giving it to those of us in the recycling business that are taking that same product that was virgin, reuse now, called recycling, we're shipping it back to be reused, and we're not getting any tax breaks on that. Joe Garbarino is a recycling enthusiast. He feeds his herd of prize-winning pigs undiscarded food. Overall, he recycles 25% of his area's garbage, vastly more than America as a whole, which only recycles 10%. But in theory, 80% recycling is possible, although this will never be achieved without substantial government encouragement.

How are you doing today? Come on. Biggie, The world's garbage dumps are filled with untapped resources.

But in recent years, they've also become littered with wrappers and packages in unprecedented amounts. On the store shelves all over America, Reynolds foil packaging and labels possess unequal selling and protection magic. Packaging was the miracle of American marketing. Use it once, then throw it away.

Recycling was never intended. The mix of materials made it impossible anyway. Packaging took advantage of the synthetic materials produced by the post-war petrochemical industry. Materials designed to be indestructible. Can you tear it?

It's almost impossible. Does it dry out, get brittle, the chip peel or crack? Forty years later, American industry is beginning to sell a new packaging vision.

EnviroPacks, they call this one. Now they're pitching environmental values. So here's the deal, and it's a big deal. I promise to clean up my room. If, big if, you promise to clean up your act too.

See these? They're EnviroPaks. Use them to refill your old bottles. They're made of a whole lot less plastic, so you've got a whole lot less to throw away, which is cool, environmentally speaking. The thin EnviroPaks, here being test marketed.

in Canada use less plastic, and the packaging itself is designed for easier recycling. The heavy plastic container is meant to be refilled many times. It's a partial return to older habits. Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer, calculates that less packaging will save money for them and the consumer, and they're hoping that the lack of convenience will be outweighed by customers'environmental concern. Company executive Doug Moser.

We think so. Solid waste is a real issue in society, and as a responsible member of society, we think we need to do our part to reduce it. I could also say it's a business opportunity.

We think by being first in the market with this EnviroPak, we're going to gain competitive advantage versus our major competitors and gain market share. So I guess I would put them together and call it enlightened self-interest. If all the plastic containers on the supermarket shelf were replaced by environmentally friendly versions, it would indeed help relieve the pressure on landfills. But by how much? Excavating landfills is one way to find out, and that's what archaeologist Bill Rathje and his team are doing here in Sunnyvale, California.

Contrary to popular opinion, he finds that the plastics are less of a problem than other things. Plastic is really a very small portion of landfills. It's about 5% by weight, not much more than that by volume when you consider that almost all of it is squashed. Newspapers, on the other hand, are 10% to 16% of landfills by both weight and volume. They're the largest single identifiable commodity in landfills.

Thanks for watching. For anyone but an archaeologist, there's another surprise about those newspapers. October 7th, 1965. When I first started digging landfills, it wasn't very surprising to me that we found newspapers that were 10 years old. I mean, archaeologists have dug up paper that's 2,000 years old. But a lot of people I talked to began saying, wow, 10 years old?

I thought newspapers degraded in a couple of months or a couple of years. So we began... realizing that in people's minds there's sort of a mythology that newspapers will biodegrade very rapidly.

Phone book! Phone book. Pianos.

Landscape. Draperies. Truth, justice, the American way, and phone books.

Could the garbage in landfills be made to decay? Rasche sends samples to Jean Bogner, a geologist who's working to identify ideal landfill conditions. She compares the effects of adding new elements like bacteria.

To date, the single most influential additive has been water. What's interesting here is that we have five bottles, and in each of the bottles we put 25 grams of landfill refuse from the same sample, from the same depth, from the same landfill. And the only difference between what went in these bottles was the amount of moisture we added.

You can see the tremendous difference in the degree of decomposition between the sample which had no additional moisture and the sample which had 100 milliliters of additional moisture. Moisture may work in the laboratory, but in real landfills it creates its own problems. As it percolates down, it picks up inks, paint, and other chemicals from the garbage.

The result is called leachate, a toxic liquid that leaks out, contaminating streams and groundwater. But leachate can be controlled. simply lining the landfill with huge sheets of rubber like this. It's a common practice in many industrial countries, only recently made compulsory in the United States.

And well-designed landfills can even yield benefits. The benefits can be seen in Gene Bogner's decomposing garbage samples. As the garbage breaks down, it produces methane gas, which can be drawn off. That means that garbage dumps are potential energy sources.

This site receives 13,000 tons of Los Angeles garbage a day. It's America's largest modern landfill, and the world's largest producer of methane from garbage. The landfill's earth covering is peppered with collection pipes, which channel the gas to an on-site power plant.

The landfill is fully lined, so the operators can encourage decomposition by adding moisture, in this case, sewage sludge. Disposal costs are ten times less here than elsewhere, because the power plant generates one percent of Los Angeles'electricity, enough for 100,000 local homes. Although America produces more methane this way than any other country, garbage remains an essentially untapped resource.

Jean Bogner. It represents a very cheap source of energy for us if we care to tap it. At the present time...

there are about 70 commercial landfill gas facilities across the United States. Now, that's still a relatively small percentage, considering we have perhaps some 9,000 landfills in existence in this country. This is newspaper recycling in Japan.

It's a long-established practice here, and it shows an attitude to resources quite different from the United States. It's called tissue paper exchange, for the token rolls of toilet paper given out. Japan, an island nation, used to be careful with resources. But now, with increasing wealth, attitudes are changing.

People favor virgin materials, and the exchange rate encourages. imports. So, as America recycles more, Japan recycles less, showing that economic forces are often stronger than environmental values.

Company president Matsuzawa. The tissue paper exchange business is not doing well now. For example, because of the yen dollar exchange rate, America's economy is not doing well.

American recycled paper and pulp are inexpensive when imported to Japan. So naturally, the price I get for my paper keeps going down. Since 1985, half the paper recyclers in Tokyo have closed.

Increasing wealth has brought more than American recycled paper to Japan. Fast food and the disposable society have arrived with a vengeance. The The amount of garbage is rapidly increasing, but so are imaginative ways of dealing with it. This popular public garden, built on a landfill in Tokyo Bay, is one answer to what the government's chief solid waste scientist, Masuro Tanaka, sees as the new throwaway Japan. My mother always taught me material is very important.

Everything is coming from God. And all... Oil is coming from outside, so deal with material carefully.

But nowadays, young people are rich and enjoy every day. So, very wasteful. These are sanitation workers in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo. They run a waste management program considered a model for all of Japan. Maybe even the world.

One of the secrets of their success is their active solicitation of community interest in waste. Today's parade announces a battery collection day later in the month. Batteries are recognized as too toxic to throw away with other trash. The engineer behind the program, a true visionary of garbage, is Takeyuki Yoshida, and he's given himself a catchy stage name.

In Machida, residents are asked to divide their garbage into five categories. Today, they bring only organics, like food waste to the collection point. Waste number one always attends. To encourage cooperation from the people, I ask them deeply from the bottom of my heart to work together.

That is why I bow. So each citizen of Machida must join in considering what waste really is, so that they can appreciate waste as a resource and can recognize that waste should be reused. Let's recycle. Let's start a culture from here. I want Machida to be a cradle of waste recycling culture.

The MRC, the Machida Recycling Center, is headquarters for the waste management program. It's a community center, a place for school trips and adult education classes. There's even a daycare program for the town's handicapped.

Here, waste no more. Waste number one makes education a priority. Sensible waste management, he says, must become second nature.

Waste types must be separated to be recycled. Toxic items like batteries that contain mercury need special handling. Bottles can be reused directly. The key idea is that good waste management is systematic.

Separate some, recycle some. If that's done right, the rest can be successfully handled way that would shock many non-Japanese. They incinerate the rest, organics, soiled paper, and light plastics.

It's called integrated waste management, common in Europe and Japan, but unknown in America. At Machida, the incinerator is run meticulously, as it has to be, to work correctly. The furnace is constantly monitored and adjusted to suit the particular waste composition.

Mistakes can lead to unacceptably high levels of pollutant emissions, in spite of the fact that the... plant is fitted with stacked scrubbers. But, as waste number one explains, toxic emissions like dioxins or heavy metals are avoided because the materials that would generate them are never allowed to reach the incinerator in the first place. American incinerators aren't this good, according to Alan Hershkowitz, an expert in incinerator technology. Basically the facilities that burn garbage in the United States are classic industrial giants.

They are filthy, they're noisy, To some extent, they're smelly. They're not the kind of facilities that we see in Japan where they are literally clean enough to take third-grade schoolchildren through them. In fact, visiting garbage-burning facilities in Japan, you have to take your shoes off and put on slippers and put on white gloves so you don't get the facilities dirty.

Incinerators have a bad name in America, but it's not because they don't work. It's because they have never been run properly. These technologies can achieve their optimal removal efficiencies for all the pollutants of concern only under very precise operating protocol.

Unfortunately, the... workers required, the kind of worker training required to operate these facilities at those levels of efficiency doesn't exist in the United States. One result is that nobody wants an incinerator in their...

backyard. Integrated waste management programs are hard to adopt in America as protests mount over badly run facilities. Our gardens don't produce like they used to. And I do think that we're, a lot of this, the particulates that are dropping onto our ground, and they're going to be there forever.

We want clean air. We don't want something that's going to put any more into it. We just have to learn to say no and let them know we mean it. All American waste is man-made. systematically including both recycling and incineration protests like these will continue the biggest problem are the incinerators because they fight for this waste useless films and plastics that are not recyclable don't need to be part of the waste stream these things go up in smoke and they're a major contributor to the acid rain problem what we're doing in the United States is we're taking non combustible materials like glass and metals we're taking recyclable materials like like paper and plastics, and we're throwing them into furnaces.

Nine US industry of substantial resources and we're giving US citizens a lot of reason to scream and yell about the development of garbage burning facilities that are going to undermine recycling and cause toxic air emissions. part of Machida's waste management system is not even contemplated in America. The toxic incinerator ash is stabilized with cement, forming pellets.

The pellets are then landfilled, where they'll provide a stable base for for a future park or golf course. Finally, Machida's landfill, like all in Japan, is of course lined, and any leachate produced is channeled off to a treatment plant. To Masaru Tanaka, expensive processes like these are unavoidable.

We have to minimize the pollutions, so we can't consider that it's too expensive or economic. Japanese choices, this is solution, no other choice. Clean water sustaining a field of lotus plants is the end product of the lychee purification system.

It's an astute demonstration of Machida's waste management success. Like everything else here, it's the brainchild of waste number one, designed to help the community accept their incinerators. Japan's most striking example of reaping benefits from garbage is the Tokyo Bay landfill.

New York has fresh kills. Tokyo has this. The gardens, pool and gymnasium are heated by the world's third largest incinerator.

Japan's waste management works, socially and environmentally. So combining of recycling and installation, material recovery and energy recovery, that both together, that is future waste management policy in Japan. Waste management has not always been a success in Japan. In the 1970s, there were even violent protests, but involving a different kind of waste. For more than a decade, dumping by the Chiso Chemical Company had caused hundreds of deaths and crippled thousands.

This notorious tragedy was one of the first clear cases of human disease from industrial toxic waste contamination. The victims suffered nervous system damage, which in some cases was passed on to children. Minamata disease, as it came to be called, was caused by methylmercury discharged into Minamata Bay. The poison became concentrated in the marine life, eaten locally. Today, with the mercury still in the bay, there's a joint effort by the government and the company to dredge the seafloor.

Fishing is no longer allowed, but the ban is not easy to enforce. So authorities are collecting and grinding contaminated fish. The resulting pulp is stored in tanks because no way has yet been found to dispose of the of this toxic legacy.

The Minamata poisonings were followed by toxic waste disasters in many parts of the globe. Lekkerkerk in Holland and Love Canal in America are two on a long list of communities hit by the new scourge of the industrial world. Most countries have responded with effective regulations, none more than in the United States, as Joel Hirshhorn, a congressional advisor on hazardous waste, explains. The regulatory system we have in place today, with its criminal penalties, has made large corporations very, very sensitive to the possibility of creating the love canals of the future.

Big corporations want to avoid cleanup. costs which can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars just for one location. So the regulatory system will prevent the creation of many future love canals.

But the regulatory system is never perfect. One problem with regulation is it needs vigilant enforcement. This Los Angeles police unit regularly checks sewers for surreptitious dumping. The first environmental crime strike force in the world.

It has already sent 50 executives to jail for these newly recognized offenses. Chief Prosecutor John Lynch. At first blush, an environmental crime may not seem as serious as, for example, a robbery or a murder.

But if you look at the impact on society as a whole, if you take something like a toxic cloud, contamination of a groundwater supply, that makes a single act of murder even pale because the murder has one victim. And you may extend that to the immediate ...family, and you may talk about some hypothetical damage to society that a murderer exists and this violent act has occurred. But if you talk about contamination of a groundwater supply or poisoning the air, you can be talking about affecting thousands of people.

for 10 or 20 or 30 years, that's a significant violent act against the society as a whole. And it is a crime. The strike force has to cope with thousands of industries which handle an enormous variety of hazardous materials. But it's hard to know exactly what goes on down there.

So this can never be the perfect solution to industrial waste problems. It has become very expensive to do things correctly, to dispose of hazardous waste and to treat it or to recycle it. And as a consequence of that, I think you see an awful lot of mid-sized to small businesses that try to cut corners economically that violate the criminal law.

There is an entirely different way to approach industrial waste and it's worked successfully here in Denmark for 20 years. This is one of a national network of 21 government-run collection points for hazardous waste. Every factory has one within 30 miles.

The only obligation to make the delivery and report the contents. Although to be safe, are always taken for analysis. From here, the government ships the waste to a central treatment plant.

The whole point is to make treatment as easy as dumping. This remarkable treatment scheme, probably the world's best best hazardous waste handling system has been running successfully for 20 years. It was sensible environmental thinking, not a Danish love canal, that inspired the program.

Denmark's hazardous waste ends up in the small town of Nyborg. Twenty years ago, local residents did not object to the idea. Nowadays, with so much more known about industrial waste, perhaps they would. But they can take comfort in the fact that the nearby plant has run as well as it could possibly be.

When each shipment arrives, its contents are already known. That makes the first rule of hazardous waste treatment easy to follow. Different materials must be kept separate and handled individually, just like the garbage management in Japan. Discarded drugs are included. Consumers simply have to return them to any pharmacy for them to end up here.

The same applies to batteries and other household hazardous waste. Waste containing toxic heavy metals is chemically treated to... produce a concentrated solid.

This will be stored in a lined landfill, carefully mapped to allow later recovery. Manufacturers have to pay for their share of these expensive processes, so they've learned that waste treatment is a a real cost. Program manager Per Rehman.

PER REHMAN, In the beginning, many industries tend to forget that waste is costing money, and therefore they forgot about including the calculation in their calculation for the products that there is something called waste fees. Now, we have tried to change that so that it's not quite a normal part of their calculation that it's going in on equal level as water, labor, housing and all that. Organics like pesticides, waste oil and paint go to the incinerators. Like Japan, they're properly run and the emissions are scrubbed so air pollution is negligible.

And like Japan, the local people benefit. Half the town gets its home heating this way. And a new incinerator could soon provide electricity.

Here the philosophy is that a well- well-run incinerator offers the least environmentally offensive solution to a problem that's not going to go away. By using incineration, you are transferring the organics to water, principal water and carbon. dioxide by putting it on a landfill it's just postponing the whole thing 20-30 years so that our children can have the pleasure to deal with it in the future.

Incineration inevitably produces toxic ash, which must be landfilled, as in Japan. So even this well-run treatment system is not ideal. Far better is not to generate waste in the first place.

And around the world, that's beginning to happen. to happen. Literally, you can walk through any industrial activity, look around and use common sense and see ways to immediately cut the generation of waste. And lots of chemical companies, what people have been doing, for example, is seeing how they use water.

Enormous quantities of water are used to clean chemical equipment. that dirty water becomes toxic waste. If they use less water, or if they replace water with mechanical techniques, ultrasound techniques, or just different subtle ways of cleaning equipment, they can immediately cut down on the generation of liquid hazardous waste.

Reducing waste at the source can be seen in action at this California factory, Aero Scientific, one of America's top ten printed circuit board makers. Despite its clean image, this is not a clean industry. It uses extremely toxic materials. The boards themselves are etched with acids, dissolving heavy metals in the process.

Where before, the metal and acid mixtures would have gone down the same path. the sewer. Here, a recycling system neutralizes the acids, purifies 90% of the water for return to the plant, and recovers different metals for reuse or for sale as scrap. The system makes economic, environmental, and environmental decisions.

and even managerial sense. Company president, Sam Hughes. Having the system allows us not to create the waste in the first place.

It allows us to, it's easier to manage. If it runs that good, it's self-contained, we don't have spills, we don't have as much potential for spills. It's just easier to manage.

We can spend our time doing other things instead of wrestling with that problem every day. Waste reduction works well in this industry. In others, it may not. But for the idea to spread...

government intervention will be needed. Joel Hirschhorn. Government has to make up its mind.

Whether we want industry to spend its money in the old-fashioned way, where they keep building end-of-pipe facilities to deal with the waste that they indeed produce, or does government want industry to spend its money on inventing and using clean technology so it doesn't produce pollution, so industry doesn't need the incinerators and the landfills and all the other facilities that deal with waste. That's a fundamental public policy view that quite has not been reconciled in the United States. As developing countries industrialize, they too generate environmental pollution, from car exhaust to toxic waste.

The second. The sad truth is that high-tech waste treatment systems are often beyond the reach of these countries. In the last 50 years, Lima, Peru has swelled from 600,000 to a population of 7 million. Even basic services have been cut down.

have not kept up. In the cluster of shanty towns that surround the urban center, garbage collection is not readily available. Water is not piped to most of the city. Instead, a water truck visits the barrio daily.

The amount delivered to each family is a mere half gallon per person per day to cover everything from washing to drinking. In an industrialized city, country one person uses 50 times as much. Most of Lima's sewage is discharged untreated into the Pacific Ocean through a series of open sewers snaking through the area. One sewer passes through Acapulco, a shanty town on the coast which its founders hoped would one day be as attractive as the Mexican resort.

This Acapulco sewer joins up with a major drain nearby. The drain runs through one of the few open spaces available as a playground. In spite of the serious health hazard, local children find the water irresistible. Town councillor, Justino Torres Rio.

The children swim in this water, especially in the summer, because they don't have access to the ocean. The consequence of this contamination is the spread of typhoid, scabies and funguses, all kinds of illnesses. We have gone to the authorities, but so far we have not found solutions. In contrast, most industrial countries treat their sewage using complicated plants like this. It's a typical installation using an array of chemicals and a battery of tanks, pipes and pumps.

When it comes in, the raw sewage is first held in settling tanks, normally kept covered to minimize both health and safety. health risks and smell. 62 million gallons of sewage a day are handled here, from a town of about half a million. The standard treatment process is explained by engineering professor Bob Gerhardt. The first phase of conventional wastewater treatment is primary treatment.

It's a physical process relying on gravity. The solids are separated from the liquid. The liquid goes on to subsequent treatment. The solids are taken on to methane digestion. fermentation process.

The digester tanks greatly speed up natural processes, which use microorganisms to break down waste, like on the bottom of a pond, for example. Most of the sludge produced in the tanks is then discarded in a landfill. Meanwhile, these aeration units handle the liquid part of the sewage.

This mimics another natural process in which other microorganisms consume dissolved organic material. Then, once the the microorganisms have been removed, secondary treatment, as this is called, is complete. At the end of secondary treatment, there is a physical process called a secondary clarifier. In this process, those beneficial microorganisms are settled, recycled, and reused in the aeration unit. As you can see, the water is pretty clean at this point.

In the United States and most of the developed world, this would be considered the end of wastewater treatment. Most places chlorinate the water just before discharge, but here they use more chemicals and filtration in an additional treatment stage. It produces a waste liquid close to drinking water standards.

High-tech treatment like this is effective, if you can afford it. But it's energy and chemical intensive. And like garbage dumping, it wastes resources which sewage could provide. And it's beyond the means of two-thirds of the world.

as Bob Gerhardt, who advises developing countries on the subject, has discovered. It's uncommon to find waste treatment in developing countries because it's unaffordable to begin with. Part of the reason it's unaffordable... is that the technologies that are being transferred by development organizations from various countries in the world and the engineers who are asked to implement those projects are totally inappropriate. They involve technologies that are expensive to build and expensive to operate and maintain.

But in one section of Lima, there's a sewage treatment system which offers none of these disadvantages. Based on this network of ponds, locally built and operated, it serves 100,000 people. The initial step is identical to the high-tech plant. Simple screening out of objects that can't be biologically treated. But here, the similarity ends.

The sewage is channeled to ponds, in which two processes will happen. The solids fall to the bottom, where in the same pond they'll slowly decompose. It's like combining the settling tanks and digester at the high-tech system in one location. The liquid moves on to ponds, where algae grow. If conditions are maintained correctly, the natural photosynthesis will not only consume organic materials, but also produce wide changes in acidity, or pH. That's as good as chlorination, as manager Hugo Nava explains.

The photosynthesis that needs sand will produce oxygen and consume CO2 during the day. During the night, it will release again the CO2 in the water. This consumption I'm releasing of CO2 will create a wide range of pH that could go from 10 during the day to 6 during the night.

This variation in pH kills the bacteria and is the way we purify the water. After 20 days, the water is safe to reuse. So, recently, they've added a third set of ponds to raise fish. Remaining organic nutrients support the growth of plants which feed a hardy species called tilapia.

Doce cinco. Quince nueve. By using a fish that can consume the phytoplankton that is produced in the tertiary pond, we can obtain a product that could be valuable for the community in terms of money or in terms of protein. Nutrient-rich treated sewage not used for fish farming goes to irrigate the desert. Low rainfall is the main reason for the drought.

Here has driven some people to order their crops with untreated sewage. But around the treatment ponds, there is now a much healthier alternative. Treated sewage wastewater was used to raise this corn crop.

It will support a cattle herd which provides food and brings in cash. For the local people, the treatment ponds are a success on several levels. First, they provide an essential service for safeguarding health. Second, by reducing pollution of the Pacific, locally caught seafood is safer to eat. Above all, waste has become a resource.

But in spite of such advantages, this system has not been widely adopted. There is suspicion of low-tech methods the world over. This is Arcata, in California. Suspicion of low-tech is as strong in the United States as anywhere. But in this town, alternatives are a way of life.

Good morning, Arcata! Welcome to Flush with Pride here on the Waterfront. days.

Hope you enjoy the great weather and all the good times. Fifteen years ago, when strict clean water laws came out, Arcata was cited as a polluter of Humboldt Bay. The state encouraged participation in a regional high-tech treatment scheme. Something had to be done, not least to protect the area's valuable oysters.

But Arcata was concerned about expense and disruption. Today the solution can be seen in 94 acres of newly created wetlands that lie between the town and the bay. These marshes provide low-tech sewage treatment so and popular that people here say they flush with pride.

Like Peru, it's brought many benefits. Bob Gerhardt helped design the system. The area that we're standing on right now was an open dump that received all of the county solid waste. waste for a period of about 10 years up until 1973. At that time it was closed out by taking muds from the bay and putting it on top and it's caused this elevated platform that we're on which we refer to as Mount Trishmore.

Treatment begins at the edge of the marsh. In a perfect illustration of low-tech suspicion, state authorities required that primary treatment, settling and digesting solids, be done with this conventional equipment. although Bob Gerhard insists the marshes could easily do the job.

So the first unconventional stage is these oxidation ponds. As in Peru, they use algal growth to consume organic material and kill off pathogens. City engineer David Hull.

We take samples fairly often from all these ponds to see how the treatment process is going and make sure that we're achieving the standard we need to. This water then is as treated as the oxidation ponds will treat the wastewater. You can see there's a lot of suspended solids in there, not much clarity at all. Next, at the point where the Peruvian wastewater would feed fish and water crops, Arcadia's marshes come into play.

First, the community of organisms that grow on the stems that are submerged in the marsh, there's bacteria and fungus and algae cells and things like that. They will actually grow on the marsh. grab onto suspended material as it moves through and acts as a physical filter. Another process that wetlands do for us to make the water cleaner is they have this ability to absorb nutrients.

Now nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus are essential to the plant's growth and in fact when they're absorbed in the plant tissue they'll make it grow bigger and better. That's why people fertilize their lawns and stuff. But these nutrients, these same nutrients, had they not been taken out can in some cases become a pollution problem.

problem. As in Peru, marsh treatment needs several weeks, but the results are remarkably good. This is below our standard, and so this would be adequate for discharge to the bay.

There are times of the year that this is actually fairly clear. It almost looks like tap water coming out of here. It does vary seasonally, but as long as we can keep it below our discharge requirements, then it's a success. Once through the marsh, the water is pumped into Humboldt Bay, where the oysters are thriving.

The marsh itself has become an Audubon bird sanctuary, and there's a constant stream of enthusiasts from across the state. Most of the visitors have probably no idea that their beautiful natural surroundings are, in fact, a sewage treatment plant. Arcata's system is cheap to build and run.

The only problem is space. It needs many times the area that a high-tech system uses. But Bob Gerhard is convinced that there's no city where appropriate land could not be found.

People are skeptical of doing something like this on a large scale. This is Arcata, a small community. A community the size of...

8 million people, for example, would require something like 2,000 to 3,000 acres to do this. You might say there's no wetlands available to do this. Well, in fact, there probably is. There's degraded saltwater marshes, degraded industrial and commercial property that could be used for this purpose. Sewage treatment, bird sanctuary, and now the former town dump is about to yield another bonus.

The city of Arcata has found other resources associated with the cattails and bulrushes that grow in these wetlands. For example, the lower parts of the cattail and the tubers, the root structure, at this time of year is full of starch. as these plants start to store for the winter. This starch can be converted to ethanol, and that ethanol can be used to mix with gasoline to form gasohol.

The city is proposing that project, and the city council has voted money to start the first step in the project to use the cattails from the marsh to supply gasohol to the police cars. Marsh treatment is not fully trusted. The state still insists on chlorinating the wastewater. Unnecessarily, according to Bob Gerhardt.

The world is very skeptical of low-tech solutions. That comes from several points of view. Engineers, for the most part, are more comfortable designing systems that they can control externally.

Administrative people and regulatory people would rather have something that's been proven, at least in terms of process control. So the combination of regulatory administrative people and engineers not trusting low-tech technology has really hurt the development and the technology transfer of these types of systems. I think that's changing, though. It's changing because of the resource constraint of not having an infinite amount of money and an infinite amount of chemicals and energy to spend on these kinds of projects. Resource constraints are one stimulus for sensible waste management, like using sewage or recycling garbage.

But these new ways of thinking are essential for a more basic reason. The Earth, after all, is a closed system. There's no such place as away.

That's why all attempts to bury waste in the ground, dump it in the ocean, or over the border, are environmental disasters. But today, the throwaway society carries on, regardless. According to archaeologist Bill Rathje, It may be time to learn the lesson of history.

Garbage doesn't come out of thin air. For garbage, you have to have consumers and consumerism. You have to have the people that procure the resources and manufacture them. process them and distribute them and you have to have the consumers that go out and purchase them and use them and then throw the remnants away most of the societies that archaeologists have found most fascinating are the societies that were the super consumers of the past egypt with all its gold and jewels the huge tombs at tikal and the big temples the huge city of teotihuacan in mexico where you've got huge palaces and murals and lavish displays of the artifacts, the resources of the society. The societies that were affluent were the biggest producers of garbage.

And these are the societies that I think have real lessons for us, because we are in the same boat. And what happened to them? Well, these societies used and used and used until all of a sudden they found out resources were in short supply.

At that point, they recycled, they reused, they were very conscious of resource allocation. But it was usually too little too late, and the society fell apart. We're going to have to become, in our society, efficient in our resource use, because if we get to the point where we're forced into it, we'll face the same answer. as all the other civilizations.

Right now, how we handle our household waste in America is changing fast. Last year, 500 towns started up recycling programs because it saves on dumping costs. So there's a good chance it won't take much to persuade your town to do the same.

Everybody wins. The town saves money, we all save resources, and the environment is better off. Please join me next time for Race to Save the Planet.

Major funding for Race to Save the Planet is provided by the Annenberg CPB Project and public television viewers. Corporate funding is provided by Ocean Spray. Our continuing aim is to preserve and protect what we cannot create. Additional funding is provided by Jesse Smith Noise Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D.

and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, and by the following. For more information on the College Telecourse, video cassettes, off-air videotaping, and books based on the series, call 1-800-LEARNER. This is PBS. The Global Ecology Handbook, published by Beacon Press, is available for $16.95 plus shipping.

A transcript of this program is available for $5. Please call 1-800-TALK-SHOW or send a check to Race to Save the Planet, Journal Graphics, 267 Broadway, New York, New York, 10007. Next on Race to Save the Planet, what does the environment mean to different people? In Zimbabwe, it's pressure on the land. In Thailand, the breakneck pace of growth.

In Sweden, coping with the modern world. Watch It Needs Political Decisions, next time on Race to Save the Planet.

Transcript for:Waste Management Strategies for a Sustainable Future

Transcript for:
Waste Management Strategies for a Sustainable Future