The Coral Gables Times

WORD, BUT —

BY GEORGE FIELDING ELIOT eration are the need for a substantial capital investment, high operating costs ($4 to $5 per ton), and air pollution. Some authorities still believe incineration provides the only feasible long-term solution. The Metropolitan Study Commission of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, sees local landfill sites being filled up and communities facing the costs of longer and longer hauls to areas where land can be made available. Even dumping grounds for incinerator ashes are in increasingly short supply. A number of communities in the county (Wauwatosa, Whitefish Bay, Shorewood, West Allis, South Milwaukee) have built or rebuilt incinerators. To some criticism that these plants are of small capacity and hence inherently inefficient, the Commission points out that several communities could join together to build one large, fully efficient plant to be run cooperatively. There is some indication, however, that the annexation policies pursued by the City of Milwaukee have made neighboring smaller communities a little shy of cooperative projects as too suggestive of a loss of the identity they have fought so hard to retain. So what, says the Commission, do you do when you run out of landfill sites and have to start paying prohibitive long-distance hauling costs? Long-distance transfer hauling in big trucks or railroad cars to a cooperatively owned landfill site (perhaps outside the county) might be one answer. Another that has been suggested is to start fill-site enclosures of tongue-and groove sheet-steel piling in shallow areas of Lake Michigan; this might help add to county park areas and to the Milwaukee Harbor Wharf. Some incinerator enthusiasts insist that prejudice against incinerators arises from misuse in the past, notably by overloading when daily loads have overtaken designed capacity due to rising populations. An overloaded incinerator can, it appears, become an almost hopeless mess. Still, as William S. Foster, editor of the magazine American City, points out in his March, 1960, issue, there are veteran incinerators operating to everyone's satisfaction in built-up areas of such places as Brookline, Mass., and Darien, Conn. Hollywood, Florida, is proud of a "custom-built" incinerator, specially designed for Hollywood's low, flat terrain and occasional hurricane-force winds, and now producing a $37,000 annual saving by centralizing the operations of sanitation-department equipment and personnel. And in Boston, the incinerator provides all heat for the City Hospital—annual savings, $115,000. Each community or group of communities has this refuse problem to think about—now and for the future. Landfill sites will be more expensive and more costly to reach under exploding population pressures. It may not always be easy to induce town fathers to find money for incinerators or to agree to locate one conveniently—even though good ones don't smell, the daily parade of refuse trucks is no joy to the neighbors. You can, of course, fall back on old-fashioned methods. You can feed garbage to hogs, but you have to cook it or you can't sell the pork. You can just use the good old-fashioned dump, if you can stand the smell, the eyesore, and the rats. One community in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, estimates 100,000 rats, fat ones, on its town dump and is frantically trying to get rid of them because, in this case, the rat population is outgrowing the daily food supply provided by the dump and is spreading all over town. The simple solution applied by the folks of Ketchikan, Alaska—they just dump the refuse on the beach and push it into the sea—isn't universally acceptable; New York and Oakland, California, used to haul garbage out to sea and dump it 20 to 50 miles offshore, but the results along the beaches caused the practice to be condemned finally as a health hazard. FOR THE SMALL COMMUNITY and even for many big ones, there's little doubt that sanitary landfill is the most attractive and inexpensive means of garbage disposal provided that enough fill area can be assured for the years to come. But of one thing you can be sure: whether you burn or bury or just try to forget the whole problem and hold your nose when you pass the town dump, those 21⁄4 pounds per person per day are going to go on piling up—now and in all the years to come. The towns are going to have to put it somewhere—and keep on putting it somewhere. families—and where are the towns going to put it? PHOTOGRAPH BY DON CHANDLER