Reflections
Thursday, December 01, 2011
By Lanny Hickman
Every now and then, someone will remember that I used to be in the field of solid waste management. They call me for reflections about how it was back in the old days compared with today. And they always ask me where I think our field is going in the future.
Back in the old days, when I first went to work in the garbage business (the 1950s and 1960s), it was garbage. We had over 200,000 open burning dumps, we were going to run out of landfill space in five years, there were hundreds of garbage toasting incinerators, and refuse collection and disposal was the second most dangerous business in America. Blacks were the dominant grunts in the garbage business, and no women worked in the garbage business. There were literally thousands of small mom-and-pop garbage companies, recycling was restricted to rag pickers and the feeding of pigs, and the people in the business had no pride of work.
We used to say that our business would never have a recession, because the garbage—aka solid waste—was always generated. The current recession proved that thesis wrong. Not only has generation declined, but the markets for all of the materials captured from the solid wastestream weakened and almost disappeared, and the option was to pile the stuff up or send it to the landfills.
In the 1970s we had only five years of landfill capacity left. In the 1980s we had only five years of landfill capacity left. And today many believe that we have five years of landfill capacity left. I disagree, and I am investing part of my estate in landfill futures, and future Hickman generations will live well off of those futures.
Today, we have the finest sanitary landfills in the world. We are working hard to divert as much of the stuff that business, industries, agra-business, and people no longer want away from landfills to conserve the landfill space. There are even those who think that we can actually do away with landfills; those thoughts will just make my landfill futures more valuable.
We face a major dependence on a vast portion of our energy needs on foreign oil. Oil from countries that do not like us. Countries that support jihad against us. Countries that in a blink of an eye will have the Bomb because they have a ton of money. Money from the oil fields that our oil companies and our oil recovery technologies were there to find, capture, and draw energy from. Yet we continue to not have a long-term energy policy that will eliminate our dependence on these strange and hateful countries in the Middle East and even as close as South America. And the extremist environmentalists in this country, through poor science and just dumb stuff, have convinced people that waste-to-energy plants will cause warts to grow, lungs to dry up, livers to flood with bile, etc., etc., etc. Truly, though, even after a successful recycling system is in place to capture materials from the solid wastestream there is enough combustible stuff left to make a major dent in our dependence on foreign oil.
Recycling has finally become a functional part of solid waste management. To make this happen has required extraordinary regulations, taxes, and money by state government. States are in serious financial straits. Our economy is not going to get back to where it was for some time to come. Not back to where it was when the megabanks forgot what they were in business to do. Where will the continued emphasis that is needed to keep recycling afloat come from if the states cannot keep up the pressure and bucks as they have in the past? They cannot expect help from the feds. Hell, it may not be long before there will be no federal presence to protect environmental quality—aka public health protection—in this country. Recycling is just another way to manage a resource out of place. Perhaps, if we would consider it that way and charge the proper costs of management to the generator, the need for artificial underpinnings might not be there. On the other hand, markets, markets, markets. If we charged the generator(s) the real costs for picking up and getting rid of their stuff, we should be able to pay these markets to take the resource.
Finally, many see a bright future where there is zero waste, solid wastes will be a sustainable product, and those bad landfills and waste-to-energy plants will just be items like the mastodon. Which, by the way, may be cloned sometime in the foreseeable future. I’m still betting on the value of my landfill futures.
Author's Bio: Lanny Hickman is former executive director of SWANA and a member of MSW Management's Editorial Advisory Board. |
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