THE NEW APOCALYPSE WILL SOCIETIES DROWN IN RUBBISH, OR REUSE IT?

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32539, 24 February 1971, Page 14

THE NEW APOCALYPSE WILL SOCIETIES DROWN IN RUBBISH, OR REUSE IT?

(By

WADE GREEN

I, in the "New York Times." Reprinted by arrangement)

(New York Times News Service, copyright 1971)

The new apocalypse: the world no longer expires in fire and brimstone—it suffocates under a bio-undergradable clutter of bottles, plastic coffee cups, abandoned Chevrolets, aluminium cans and trillions of those doohickies that pull off the tops of cans. With a finer sense for irony than survival, the planet drowns in garbage cast off in a relentless, pursuit of happiness through consumption.

That ta something close to the ultimate scenario as trash-minded environmentalists envision it—unless An ever more ingestive society does something with its disgorgements except throw them away. The something on the minds of environmentalists is cybemetically styled "recycling” of waste. And it is hard to find anyone who, on undiscarded paper at least, is not for it.

President an advocate Among the more prominent advocates has been President Nixon. In two messages to Congress last year, Mr Nixon stressed the need for reclaiming waste and turning it into new products. He proposed and ultimately signed a measure, called the Resource Recovery Act, to study recycling methods. Yet only this month the Federal Government was branded as a major obstructor along the great circle route of waste recycling. The critic was Mr Lindsay, Mayor of New York City. At a "Recycling Day” meeting attended by 800 industrialists, Government officials and conservationists at the Waldorf-Astoria, Mr Lindsay said that Federal policy discriminated against recycling of the major item in American garbage bins—paper, 18.8 million tons of which is discarded annually. Timber anomaly The timber industry, Mr Lindsay charged, enjoys tax advantages in depletion allowances and capital gains savings that are not accorded processors of discarded paper. “In short,” said the Mayor, "Federal tax taw makes it cheaper to cut down scarce forest preserves than to recycle surplus waste.** Mr Lindsay also noted that Federally-regulated freight rates were considerably higher for scrap metal than for virgin ore. As for the Resource Recovery Act, it “is filled with good intentions,” Mr Lindsay said, "but it completely ignores the need for a market for recycled goods.” One major market is government itself, and Mr Lindsay took the occasion to announce that “we intend to redesign our entire purchasing system to include a general preference for recycled products.” In fact, he revealed that the city government recently laid down new paper specifications that require the manufacturer to include a minimum of recycled fibres.

Many in the city administration anticipate that the Federal Government will announce a simitar paper-pur-chasing policy soon. A considerable amount of recycling has been going on since well before it was recognised as an environmental imperative. More than half of all lead discards are reused. Nearly half of all copper products in the United States are made from scrap copper. About 30 per cent of aluminium refuse is reclaimed as is 25 per cent of all paper and steel. Some notable efforts are under way, by industry and government, to broaden the scope of recycling. The deposit bottle is being reintroduced in some localities, and bounties are being paid on empty bottles and jars at a number of depots and bottling plants around the country. More than 22 million glass containers were brought in during one recent month in response to the bounty offers. Aluminium companies are paying SUS2OO a ton for the return of empty cans. The Federal Government has several test projects under way, including an effort in Madison, Wisconsin, to get householders to separate their garbage so- the components can be processed more easily. Strides in technology Then, too, there have been some strides in recycling technology, the most dramatic of which is the development of a giant fragmentiser that can rip an automobile into fist-sized pellets in a minute. Recycling optimists glimpse an ultimate fragmentiser in research under way to control nuclear fusion. They see fusion decomposing garbage into atoms which could be recomposed, presumably, into whatever raw material is wanted. Thus far, however, the problem appears to be growing much faster than the solutions. Discards have more than doubled in the last 40 years from 2.2 pounds per day per person to 5.3 pounds. Currently, New York throws out 24,000 tons of trash every day and the rate is growing by 4 per cent a year.

Take paper, lamented Eric Zausner. solid waste specialist of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. “The total quantity of paper recycled has been going up in absolute amounts,” Mr Zausner said. "But as a percentage of total paper production, it’s been going down very rapidly.” New York’s Environmental Protection Administrator, Jerome Kretchmer, was almost morose about prospects for changing such directions when he spoke at the Waldorf gathering last week. “It sometimes seems,” he said, "that wherever you make a move to encourage recycling you are blocked—by tax laws, by economic laws and by a truculent indifference typical to our society.” Wiser arithmetic The least tractable, in the eyes of some environmentalists, may be the economic laws. In the short run, at least, it is often considerably cheaper to produce goods from raw materials than recycled ones. This is because the company does not include the cost of disposing of a product when it sets the price. By some wiser arithmetic than the market’s, it is feasible, even likely, that recycling is cheaper in terms of all the costs a product brings to bear on society.

are grappling with ways to figure out such "social costs” of a product and how to include them in market prices. A disposal deposit is one approach and obligatory deposits have in fact been proposed recently by the Lindsay administration for containers and automobiles. A "reclamation allowance” for reprocessors

I paralleling the depletion allowance for raw material : miners has been proposed by ■ one economist. s But recycling, notes Mr : Zausner, is an immensely : complicated business involv- ■ ing—and threatening—many . interests. The likeliest prosi pect remains that the new i apocalypse will move closer i before it gets further away, . if it ever does.

"Recycling”—the reclaiming of such refuse as bottles and cans and its conversion into new products —is the latest battle cry of environmentalists in search of answers to the world’s burgeoning refuse problem.