Can America Win its Battle with Garbage? The Growth of the Waste StreamToday’s generation have been taught to be wasteful. We produce enormous quantities of waste, then try to bury it or burn it and forget it. But it cannot be forgotten. It washes up on our beaches, it reappears as air pollution, it creeps into our water supply; it comes back to haunt us. A throw-away society is not a sustainable society.A garbage crisis is at hand. As a nation, we have begun to worry that the growing mounds of wastes will only continue to increase as the means of disposal become further restricted. Government agencies and public officials are urgently trying to find a solution. The waste dilemma has become the centerpiece of the politics of garbage.The mood of the crisis manifests itself in countless ways, including attempts to export the problem, here or abroad. Numerous municipalities, counties, and states, particularly those with heavier concentrations of industry and greater urban density, have attempted to send their waste to less dense, often poorer areas. This has created a garbage war between states. California seeks to dispose in Arizona, New York looks to Vermont, and Minnesota makes a move on Iowa. New Jersey, especially, has been an active exporter, probing the possibilities of dumping its waste in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. These states though constrained by the commerce clause of the Constitution, have nevertheless sought to pass legislation to halt New Jersey’s aggressive export policy. But it is the city of Philadelphia and the saga of its ash barge that provides perhaps the striking example of this form of garbage imperialism. During the 1980s, Philadelphia sought to rely on incineration to reduce the amount of its municipal trash embarked for distant landfills. As a consequence, local officials were stuck with a new, and more difficult problem: how to dispose of the city’s inc...
