Lanny Hickman Jr.

Old saws, such as "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder" or "A rose is a rose is a rose," are good examples of human perspective. In our business of solid waste management with its continuing turnover of people entering and leaving the field, it seems to me that many develop their perspectives from only what they see now. This is really too bad, for it makes it difficult to understand why we do what we do today. As the result, their perspective might be somewhat shortsighted and lack a full appreciation of the positive facts and ideas and the interrelations in our field of practice. One reason for this shortsighted perspective is our lack of institutional history.

Americans are great at shaping the future but do so often without analyzing the past. Frequently the past has been erased - merely reflect on how we have torn down our architectural history, buried our land under asphalt, and stopped teaching history in our schools. The same is true in solid waste management. The evolution of our field of practice has been so rapid that many do not realize that much of what we do, we have been doing for decades but are doing it better. Perhaps that is the most significant fact about what we do today - doing better with the hand dealt us.

Consider that 50 years ago the practice solid waste management in the United States, and actually in North America, can best be described as being in the dark ages still. There were literally hundreds of thousands of open-burning dumps, which also were utilized to feed and raise hogs for the marketplace! These dumps were festering sores on the land, polluting the air, land, groundwater, and surface water. These dumps served as breeding grounds for carriers of many diseases - polio to mention only one. At the same time, solid waste was collected by hand and carried on the backs of men, mostly black men, to equipment totally unsuitable to serve as collection vehicles. It is said that a man working his normal work life collecting solid waste could be expected to pick up and carry tonnage equal to the weight of the Titanic. Our incinerators were little more than toasting ovens for our "garbage," and the chimneys of the plants spewed out black agents of respiratory disease. Recycling, or salvaging, was nonexistent: The ragman walked the streets crying for "old rags."

Pretty gruesome from anyone's perspective. Thank heavens that a few good people realized that this had to stop, that the nation's public had to be protected from these bad practices, that workers deserved a safe working environment - one that did not maim them for life - and that the resources in the solid waste stream needed to be recovered for beneficial use. Those good people set us on a course of action that resulted in what can only be viewed, from my perspective, as a remarkable record of national achievement. Today we have the finest and most regulated sanitary landfills in the world, and the number needed to do the job is less than 5,000. Today we have the finest and most regulated waste-to-energy incinerators in the world. Today we lead the world in the utilization of landfill gas as an energy source. Today the method of choice for collection is the use of mechanical devices to do the lifting. Both men and women are on the streets collecting solid waste. Today recycling is an important part of a system that we have labeled integrated solid waste management.

The technology we use today is derived directly from the inadequate past history of our field. The dump is now a sanitary landfill. The dump trucks used for collection are now mechanical and fully automated collection vehicles. The migrating LFG is now captured and used for energy. The batch incinerators are now massive, sophisticated energy plants. The ragman is now a complex business venture dedicated to recovering material resources from our wastestreams.

From my perspective, we should be proud and very impressed with our progress. For those who enter our field of practice now, understand that you enter a practice that has, essentially of its own volition, changed garbage dumping to integrated solid waste management in a mere 50 years. I challenge you to stay in the business and take our field of practice to the next level of excellence.

Lanny Hickman Jr. is a member of the MSW Management Editorial Advisory Board and author of the new book American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste Management in the United States, available at www.foresterpress.com.

MSW - May/June 2003