The Coral Gables Times

GARBAGE IS A NASTY It collects at the rate of a ton a day for every 150

EVERY DAY, in every American town from Maine to California, household refuse is accumulating at a rate of about 21⁄4 pounds per inhabitant for each 24-hour period. The housewife gets rid of garbage and rubbish by putting it outside to be picked up. After that, it's a community problem. For a community of say 30,000 population, something like 34 tons of refuse per day (aside from sewage) must be collected and disposed of one way or another. It does not just disappear. You—your community—must take it away and put it somewhere. Where? That's the problem, and it's one that isn't easily answered. In terms of modern refuse-disposal methods, there are just two things to do with it. It can be buried, or it can be partially burned and the ashes can be buried afterward with the non-combustible rubbish. Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages. Burying everything is cheaper in current operating cost, if enough land is available. This method—known to today's sanitary engineers as sanitary landfill—requires about one acre of land per year for each 10,000 population. Operating costs are in the neighborhood of $1 per ton, though higher if the haul to the disposal point averages much over 6 to 8 miles. Landfills fall into two general classifications—area landfills, using more or less flat land, and depression landfills which use natural or man-made depression or irregularities in the terrain. In area landfills, the usual method is to cut a deep trench in which the refuse is deposited and progressively covered with earth (the proportion of 6 feet of refuse covered by 2 feet of earth, as used at Hopkins, Minn., is a normal one). Parallel trenches are opened as the work proceeds. The refuse, when dumped, is compacted by heavy crawler-type tractors which reduce the bulk to as little as 25% of the original volume. With proper control, landfills produce none of the nuisance problems associated with the old-fashioned open dumps. They do not breed rats, for example (no rat has ever been known to burrow through earth for more than 12 inches to get at food), and the compacted and treated refuse does not catch fire from spontaneous combustion and make the whole neighborhood reek, as dumps have a habit of doing. Nevertheless, zoning laws, rising land values, and opposition from residents tend to limit the availability of land in or close to the thickly built-up a[?]s, which are the main sources of refuse. People are just beginning to learn the difference between landfills and dumps, and their initial reaction is likely to be, "Put that smelly thing somewhere else." Unhappily, "somewhere else" isn't always available. One landfill operation on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, threatened by an injunction suit launched by outraged property owners, was rescued by the ingenuity of the Public Works Commissioner, who gave an outdoor tea party for the complainants on top of the landfill—with the result that the injunction was dissolved by hilarious acclamation. OTHERWISE USELESS or unsightly land (swamps, sloughs, ravines, heavily eroded areas, old quarries, or gravel pits) can be used for landfill purposes with good results and eventually transformed into usable sites for parks, parking lots, airp[?]s, sports fields, as well as for light industrial or commercial construction. Waste land became a municipal asset instead of a liability, for instance, in Highland Park, Illinois, which converted a 70-acre slough area into a sanitary landfill project serving local disposal needs and those of nearby Lake Forest, Deerfield, Glencoe, and Highwood as well, bringing a substantial annual income at the rate of 45¢ per cubic yard of refuse deposited. Unfortunately, there is less and less space available for l[?]d-fill, and this brings us to the other alternative, incineration. About three-quarters of the total volume of a refuse collection (including garbage) can be burned in a modern, well-designed incinerating plant with only 5% to 15% of the original weight remaining in the form of ashes. The rest is transferred to the atmosphere as gases or particulate matter. The ashes, plus the 25% of the original refuse (cans, bottles, metal scrap, crockery, ceramics, etc.) which can't be burned, must still be c[?]n-pacted and buried; but the useful life of the municipal landfill area is extended three to four times by burning off as much as possible of the initial volume. Principal disadvantages of incin-

This is sanitary landfill—the refuse, when dumped, is compacted by heavy tractors, then covered tidily with two feet of earth.

10 Suburbia Today, May 1961