WASTE MANAGEMENT IS A COMPLEX PROBLEM

First, I would like to discuss some of the reasons why we believe that California is confronted with a serious problem which is going to take a great deal of effort to solve. We are dealing with a complex problem and the ingredients of complexity are these (Figure 1) :

1. California is growing at a rate considerably faster than the national average as can be seen on this chart. Between today and 1990, we will have doubled our population.

2. We live in a time of changing technology (Figure 2). This changing technology results in a per capita generation of waste which is increasing with the passage of time potentiating those increases due to population growth.

3. There are some inherent characteristics of waste which make our job difficult. Waste by itself causes us no problem until we release it into our environment. Once waste enters the environment in which we live, it becomes a pollutant.

Pollutants have the inherent tendency to become disseminated (Figure 3). The gases from our factories and automobiles become diluted and spread in our air far beyond their place of origin. The liquid wastes from industry and domestic sewage eventually find their way into our ground water basins and into our streams and harbors. Even our solid wastes, by contaminating ground water, can become disseminated far beyond their place of burial. Thus, we are dealing with materials that have no respect for political jurisdiction.

4. This lack of respect for political jurisdiction is augmented by poorly defined and fragmented government responsibility (Figure 4). I apologize to you for this chart which is far too busy and far too complex to use in any presentation. I can only assure you that this chart has been greatly over-simplified and in no way really shows the extent of fragmentation and overlapping of responsibility for liquid, solid and gaseous waste. Responsibility for liquid waste at the State level lies with the State Water Quality Control Board which has an advisory relationship only to the regional water pollution control boards which pass their regulatory authority down to sanitation districts and municipal departments. Solid wastes fall under the Department of Public Health and the county and municipal health departments. Gaseous wastes are shared by the State Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board and the local air pollution control districts.

5. Almost every effort that we make to dispose of solid wastes converts them either to gaseous wastes or to liquid wastes. While, in turn, treatment of liquid wastes frequently present us with solids which have to be disposed of and with gases which invade our atmosphere. The more carefully we treat our gaseous wastes, the larger the accumulation of solids we have to deal with. Thus the very nature of waste treatment demands a unified approach.

The knowledge that pollution is increasing and spreading from its source to distant places can only be the first step toward understanding the problem. Perhaps our major difficulty is in assessing the effects of pollution. It is not the existence of pollutants which troubles us but rather the things that pollutants do to the things of value in our lives. In order to plan for effective waste management and to justify the allocation of the large sums of money necessary to manage wastes, we must have a means for measuring the cost of pollution to the people of California. No meaningful estimate of the cost of pollution to the people of our state has ever been made. The fact that it is a complex job of heroic proportions does not mean it does not have to be done. Our study has shown that it can be done. Figure 5 shows some of the effects of pollution which we must measure in terms of cost. Once we have measured these costs, we can go to the public and ask how much money it is willing to invest in a waste management system in order to reduce these losses.

Such cost information alone is not yet enough. In California and in the whole nation, we are beginning to demand more from our environment than that it simply be economically productive. There is a growing demand that the environment in which we live be made aesthetically pleasing (Figure 6). The beer can littered beaches of Southern California are almost a thing of the past. We hear demands that our harbors and rivers be returned to their former state of beauty, that the smog be cleaned up so that once again we can enjoy viewing the mountains and that unsightly dump grounds and junk yards be hidden from view. President Johnson has taken a leading role in championing the cause of a more beautiful America. In his message to the Senate and House of Representatives in May 1965, he wrote:

"Today's new conservation must shift from the classic role of protecting threatened nature. It must restore beauty where it has already been destroyed. It must deal with the dangers which urbanization and growth and technology offer to the world we live in. It must make an effort to put beauty within reach of those who live in our cities, and make it part of the daily life of every American. For its concern is with restoring and enhancing the entire relationship between man and the natural world which is the source of so many treasured buman values."