Since 1960 the EPA has collected data on MSW generation and disposal in the United States. According to its report Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures (October 2003), Americans produced 229 million tons of MSW in 2001, down slightly from 230 million tons in 1999, but up from 205 million tons in 1990 and 88.1 million tons in 1960. The largest category of MSW was paper, accounting for 35.7 percent of the total. (See Figure 4.4.)
Per capita generation of MSW was 4.4 pounds per person per day, up from 2.7 pounds per day in 1960. (See Figure 4.5.) However, per capita generation was down slightly from 1990, indicating that the rate has leveled off. This is due in large part to growing rates of recovery, which is using trash for some other purpose rather than discarding it. (See Figure 4.6.)
FIGURE 4.4
Municipal solid waste (MSW) generated, by category, 2001
Why Is There So Much Garbage?
The widespread human appetite for all materials has defined this century in much the same way that stone, bronze, and iron characterized previous eras.
—U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, 1998
Most Americans produced little trash until the twentieth century. Food scraps were boiled into soups or fed to animals, which were themselves part of the food chain, providing milk, eggs, or meat for household use or for sale. Durable items were passed on to the next generation or to people more in need. Objects that were of no further use to adults became toys for children. Broken items were repaired or dismantled for reuse. Many Americans possessed the skills required for repairing items. Things that could no longer be used were burned for fuel, especially in the homes of the poor. Even middle-class Americans traded rags to peddlers in exchange for buttons or tea kettles. These "ragmen" worked the streets, begging for or buying for pennies items such as bones, paper, old iron, rags, and bottles. They then sold the "junk" to dealers who marketed it to manufacturers.
Spending time to prolong the useful lives of items and to use scraps saved money. Besides giving away clothes, mending and remaking them, and using them as rags for work, women reworked textiles into useful household furnishings such as quilts, rugs, and upholstery. Rags were also important materials collected for recycling in factories: Paper mills used rags to make paper, and a growing
FIGURE 4.5
Municipal solid waste (MSW) generation rates, 1960–2001
paper industry made it profitable for thrifty homemakers to save rags.
This trade in used goods provided crucial resources for early industrialization, but these early systems of recycling began to pass into history around the turn of the twentieth century. Sanitary reformers and municipal trash collection did away with scavenging. Technology made available cheap and new alternatives. People made fewer things themselves, and they bought more than previous generations had. They saved and repaired less and threw out more.
People of the growing middle class learned to throw things away, attracted by convenience and wanting to avoid any association with scavenging and poverty. Success often meant that one did not have to use secondhand things. As municipalities became responsible for collecting and disposing of refuse, Americans found it easier to throw things out.
THE SORTING PROCESS.
Nothing is inherently trash. Trash is produced by a human behavior called sorting. Items in people's lives eventually require a decision—to keep or to discard. Some things go here, and some things go there.
The sorting process varies from person to person, from place to place, and changes over time. What is considered rubbish changes from decade to decade. Some societies value saving things more than others: Nomadic people, who must travel light, save less. During times of war, people often have to conserve and reuse materials, a situation that is not as common during peacetime. Age
FIGURE 4.6
Recovery and discards of municipal solid waste (MSW), 1960–2001
also plays a role. The youth of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have more readily adopted the notions of convenience and disposability than their parents and grandparents, and are less likely to conserve.
Sorting is also an issue of class. Trash making creates social differences based on economic status. The wealthy can more readily afford to replace older items with new ones, and discarding things can be a way of demonstrating affluence and power.
At the turn of the millennium, people in developed nations discarded things for reasons unheard of in developing nations or in earlier times—because they no longer wanted them. Disposing of out-of-style clothes and outmoded equipment reflected a worship of newness that was not widespread before the twentieth century. Dumpsters filled with "perfectly good stuff" that was simply not new anymore—stuff of which the owner had tired.
Economic growth during the twentieth century was fueled—in part—by a growing consumer culture that demanded a continual supply of new products, disposables, and individually packaged consumer items. This, combined with "planned obsolescence" on the part of manufacturers, produced increasing volumes of garbage. Colored plastic trash bags represent the contemporary attitude about trash, far from the homemade soup, darned underwear, and flour-sack dresses of an earlier time.
As the United States became richer, the nation produced more garbage and pollution. Between 1960 and 2001 America's population grew by 55 percent, but according to the EPA in Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures, the amount of garbage produced increased 160 percent.
Growing populations, rising incomes, and changing consumption patterns have combined to complicate the waste management problem. Garbage generation expands as a city grows in size and, as consumers earn more money, their demand for consumer goods increases. This includes "convenience foods" with packaging that immediately becomes waste. Other convenience items, such as disposable diapers, also add to the mountains of waste.
ONE-TIME USE.
Today, most consumer goods are designed for short-term use. This contrasts sharply with the practices of earlier eras when materials were reused or transformed for other uses. In A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999), Susan Strasser notes that more and more things today are being made and sold with the understanding that they will soon become worthless or obsolete.
The volume of waste increases with income—poor neighborhoods generate lower amounts of solid wastes per capita than richer neighborhoods. An inventory of what Americans throw away would reveal valuable metals, paper representing millions of acres of trees, and plastics incorporating highly refined petrochemicals.
Garbage Disposal
The United States is facing a problem with its ever-growing mountains of garbage. America generates more garbage than any other nation on Earth, twice as much per person as in Europe. As with most environmental issues, waste disposal has grown to crisis proportions. The cost of handling garbage is the fourth biggest item—after education and police and fire protection—in many city budgets. Most of the nation's solid waste is dumped in landfills, but sites are rapidly filling up and many are leaking toxic substances into the nation's water supply.
The more that is learned about garbage, the more apparent it is that trucking garbage to landfills does not necessarily eliminate it. As a result, municipal governments worldwide are struggling to find the best methods for managing waste.
The History of Garbage Disposal
Around 500 B.C.E. ("before the common era"), Athens, Greece, issued the first known edict against throwing garbage into the streets and organized the first municipal dumps by mandating that scavengers transport wastes to no less than one mile from the walls of the city. This method was not practiced in medieval Europe (circa 500–1485). Parisians in France and Londoners in England continued to toss trash and sewage out their windows until the 1800s. The west end of London and the west side of Paris became fashionable in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because the prevailing winds blew west to east, carrying the smell of rotting garbage with them.
Industrialization brought with it a greater need for collection and disposal of refuse. Garbage was transported beyond the city limits and dumped in piles in the countryside. As cities grew, the noxious odors and rat infestations at the dumps became intolerable. Freestanding piles gave way to pits, but that solution soon became unsatisfactory.
In 1874 the first systematic incineration (burning) of municipal waste was tested in England. Burning reduced waste volume by 70 to 90 percent, but the expense of building incinerators and the reduced air quality caused many cities to abandon the method. Waste burial remained the most widely practiced form of disposal.
Throughout the nineteenth century many cities passed antidumping ordinances, but they were largely ignored. Some landowners and merchants resented ordinances, which they considered infringements of their rights. As cities grew so did garbage, becoming not only a public eyesore but a threat to public health.
City leaders began to recognize that they had to do something about the garbage. By the turn of the twentieth century, most major cities had set up garbage collection systems. Many cities introduced incinerators to burn some of the garbage. By the time World War I began in Europe in 1914, about 300 incinerators were operating in the United States and Canada.
Cities located downstream from other cities that were pouring their garbage into rivers sued the upstream cities because the water was polluted. As a result, more and more cities stopped dumping their garbage into rivers and began to build landfills or garbage dumps to get rid of their waste. Many coastal cities began to take their refuse out into the ocean and dump it, although much of the garbage they poured into the sea washed back to pollute the beaches.
Some health officials and reformers knew that pollution was unhealthy and could lead to sickness, but most people were not concerned about the long-term effects of garbage and pollution on the environment. As the twentieth century progressed, however, more and more Americans became concerned that garbage and pollution were harming the environment.
How Is Garbage Disposed of Today?
The EPA's Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures reported that 55.7 percent of MSW goes to land disposal, while 29.7 percent is recovered and 14.7 percent is incinerated. (See Figure 4.7.)
LAND DISPOSAL.
Land disposal includes landfills, land application, and underground injection into deep wells. Landfilling is the most widely used method. Landfills are areas set aside specifically for garbage dumping.
FIGURE 4.7
Management of municipal solid waste (MSW), 2001
There are several types of landfills. In the most common type, garbage is dumped into a large pit and ultimately buried with earth. In land application, waste is taken to a designated area and spread over the surface of the land. Garbage may also be dumped onto a waste pile on the ground where it is stored and may eventually be treated.
Landfills are popular because, when compared with the cost of alternative disposal methods, dumping waste in the ground is a relatively cheap solution to an immediate problem. MSW discards to land disposal grew steadily from the 1960s to the 1980s and then declined through the early 1990s as use of other disposal methods increased. (See Figure 4.8.) However, land disposal rebounded somewhat in the late 1990s before leveling off again in the early 2000s.
In January 2004 Biocycle magazine published the results of its 14th annual State of Garbage in America survey. The magazine reported that in 2002 there were 1,767 landfills operating in the United States, down from 2,142 in 2000 and approximately 8,000 in 1988. (See Table 4.3.) Estimates of remaining landfill capacity vary greatly from state to state.
The growing amount of waste has led to a depletion of landfill capacity. Many of the nation's active landfills will reach capacity and have to close over the coming decades. Cities that exhaust their landfills are forced to find sites elsewhere, usually in more remote areas, which increases cost for transportation and landfill fees.
FIGURE 4.8
Management of municipal solid waste (MSW), 1960–2001
New landfills are becoming harder to find. Many local officials blame the lack of new facilities on public opposition, the "not in my backyard" syndrome, rather than a lack of available space. Landfills, like prisons and interstate highways, have never been welcome in neighborhoods.
During the late twentieth century, interest in recycling grew, and most states began making recycling an important part of waste collection and disposal. Nonetheless, the nation's landfills began filling up and new ones had to be constructed. Most states began sending some of their garbage to other states that would accept it, or even to other countries. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, some states and countries no longer accepted other people's garbage.
Some states have tried to enact bans on importing garbage into their states, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in Chemical Waste Management v. Hunt (112 S. Ct. 2009, 1992), ruled that such shipments are protected by the constitutional right to conduct commerce across state borders, because states that accept garbage charge fees for garbage dumping.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF LAND DISPOSAL.
Regulations passed under the RCRA, which took effect in 1993, required landfill operators to do several things to lessen the chance of pollution. The most important standard requires all landfills to monitor groundwater for contaminants. According to the EPA, less than one-third of the nation's toxic waste dumps in 2000 met
TABLE 4.3
Number of municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills and waste to energy (WTE) plants, average tip fees, and capacity by state, 2000
| State | Number of MSW landfills | Average landfill tip fee ($/ton) | Total landfill capacity remaining (tons) | Number of WTE plants | Average WTE tip fee ($/ton) | ||
| Arizona | 41 | n/a | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Arkansas | 24 | 28.45 | n/a | 2 | n/a | ||
| California | 161 | 13.63 | 410,501,190 | 3 | n/a | ||
| Colorado | 65 | n/a | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Connecticut | 2 | n/a | n/a | 6 | 65 | ||
| Delaware | 3 | 58.50 | 20,000,000 | 0 | – | ||
| Florida | 100 | 42.47 | n/a | 13 | 59 | ||
| Georgia | 60 | 33.50 | 135,349,2741 | 1 | 45 | ||
| Hawaii | 9 | n/a | n/a | 1 | n/a | ||
| Idaho | 29 | n/a | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Illinois | 51 | n/a | 212,393,6361 | 0 | – | ||
| Indiana | 35 | n/a | 52,231,7951 | 1 | n/a | ||
| Iowa | 59 | 33.25 | 40,182,628 | 1 | 53 | ||
| Kansas | 51 | 28 | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Kentucky | 25 | 27.57 | 36,363,6361 | 1 | n/a | ||
| Louisiana | 24 | 25 | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Maine | 8 | 55 | 3,030,3031 | 4 | 65 | ||
| Maryland | 20 | 50 | n/a2 | 3 | 49 | ||
| Massachusetts | 19 | 72.60 | n/a | 7 | 71 | ||
| Michigan | 52 | n/a | 143,939,3941 | 4 | 76 | ||
| Minnesota | 21 | 50 | 18,700,000 | 15 | 50 | ||
| Mississippi | 17 | 26 | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Missouri | 24 | 33.54 | 41,432,8361 | 03 | – | ||
| Montana4 | 30 | 32 | 32,727,273 | 0 | – | ||
| Nebraska | 24 | 25 | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Nevada | 23 | 30 | 60,742,0561 | 0 | – | ||
| New Hampshire | 10 | 68 | 15,000,000 | 2 | 81 | ||
| New Jersey | 12 | 60 | 40,000,000 | 5 | 60 | ||
| New Mexico | 35 | n/a | 190,966,1421 | 0 | – | ||
| New York | 26 | 50 | 90,000,000 | 10 | 65 | ||
| North Carolina | 41 | 30 | 100,000,000 | 1 | 50 | ||
| North Dakota | 14 | 26.56 | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Ohio | 44 | 32.20 | 124,079,6241 | 0 | – | ||
| Oklahoma | 40 | 20 | n/a | 1 | n/a | ||
| Oregon | 30 | 34.50 | n/a | 1 | 68 | ||
| Pennsylvania | 49 | 48 | 298,585,524 | 6 | 74 | ||
| Rhode Island | 2 | 41.50 | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| South Carolina | 19 | 27 | 109,534,023 | 4 | n/a | ||
| South Dakota | 15 | 30 | 16,757,5761 | 0 | – | ||
| Tennessee | 34 | 28.38 | n/a | 1 | n/a | ||
| Texas | 175 | 27 | 970,000,000 | 2 | n/a | ||
| Utah | 38 | n/a | n/a | 1 | n/a | ||
| Vermont | 5 | 80 | 1,453,778 | 0 | – | ||
| Virginia | 67 | n/a | 251,810,045 | 5 | n/a | ||
| Washington | 21 | 46.48 | 180,002,767 | 4 | n/a | ||
| West Virginia | 18 | 43 | 5,674,330 | 0 | – | ||
| Wisconsin | 42 | 36.43 | 30,440,0241 | 2 | n/a | ||
| Wyoming | 53 | n/a | n/a | 0 | – | ||
| Totals | 1,767 | 107 | |||||
| 1Tonnage based on conversion from cubic yards reported (conversion of 3.3 cubic yards/ton) | |||||||
| 2Landfill capacity remaining exceeds ten years | |||||||
| 3Waste-to-energy plant burns tires for fuel | |||||||
| 42001 data from MSW Management | |||||||
| SOURCE: Scott M. Kaufman, Nora Goldstein, Karsten Millrath, and Nickolas J. Themelis, "Table 7. Number of Municipal Solid Waste Landfills and Waste to Energy Plants, Average Tip Fees, and Capacity by State for 2002," in "The State of Garbage in America," in BioCycle, vol. 45, no. 1, January 2004 | |||||||
requirements under disposal laws for monitoring underground water supplies near their sites.
The rules also require plastic liners for dump sites, and all debris must be covered with soil to prevent odors and trash from being blown away. Methane gas must be monitored, and the owner is responsible for cleanup of any contamination. To prevent pollution of the environment, these rules must be observed for a 30-year period after the landfill is closed.
Although the government plans to close all dumps that fail to meet requirements, and many landfills have been shut down at least in part because of noncompliance, the process has been slow due to a lack of resources to prosecute violators. The virtual disappearance of affordable environment-impairment liability insurance has also forced many dumps to shut down.
Newer, state-of-the-art landfills are now being built with multiple liners to prevent leaks and with equipment to treat emissions. This is very expensive. Experts point out that many of these landfills will have to accept waste from a wide region to be financially viable.
Experts agree that even the most advanced landfills may eventually leak, releasing hazardous materials into surface or underground water. Methane, a flammable gas, is produced when organic matter decomposes in the absence of oxygen. If not properly vented or controlled, it can cause explosions and underground fires that smolder for years. Increasingly, this gas is being recovered through pipes inserted into landfills and distributed or used to generate energy.
Landfills of the Twenty-First Century
Landfills are, and will continue to be, the cornerstone of the nation's waste services system. However, a number of changes will occur in site design and function. Sites will become more standardized, especially in the areas of liners and in the collection of landfill gas, which is expected to stimulate the development of new landfill gas-to-energy plants.
The number of landfills is expected to decrease due to the stricter standards and the need for operators to provide assurance that they can fund closure, cleanup, and security in the event of contamination. In many cases, it will be difficult to justify small-scale sites economically. The result will be fewer, but larger and more regional, operations. Most waste will move away from its point of generation, resulting in increased interdependence among communities and states in waste disposal. More waste will cross state lines.
The volume of waste traditionally handled at landfills will also decrease. Landfills will provide diverse services—burial of waste, bioremediation, recycling facilities, leachate collection (contaminants picked up through the leaching of soil), and gas recovery. To make landfills more pleasing to neighborhoods, operators will establish larger buffer zones and more green space and will show more sensitivity to land-use compatibility and landscaping.
Source Reduction
Many experts believe that the primary solution to the world's mounting garbage problem is "source reduction," or waste prevention. The less waste people create, the less there is to throw away. Source reduction involves minimizing the amount or toxicity of materials in products and/or reducing the amount of wastes produced during manufacturing. Manufacturing, packaging, or processing goods in certain ways "up front" will generate less refuse to be discarded.
Nearly $1 out of every $12 Americans spend for food and beverages pays for packaging. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), packaging is the second largest portion of the cost of marketing food (advertising is the largest portion). The increasing numbers of women in the workforce and changes in family structure have resulted in greater demand for convenience products—carry-out meals and frozen and vacuum-packed foods. One way to reduce waste is to trim the amount of packaging.
Soft drink consumption has also risen, increasing waste in the form of cans and plastic containers. Aluminum, the most abundant metal manufactured on Earth, was first refined into a valuable product in the 1820s. Its use has continually escalated and beverage cans are the largest single use of aluminum. They are also a source of much waste.
The advent of low-priced petrochemicals in the early twentieth century ushered in the age of plastics. Several times more plastics—a family of more than forty-six types—are now produced in the United States than aluminum and all other nonferrous metals combined. Most of these plastics are nonbiodegradable and, once discarded, remain relatively intact for many years.
Many Americans claim they would pay more for a product with environmental benefits. Marketing that considers these consumer preferences is known as "green marketing." "Green design" can make products more environmentally safe.
COMPOSTING.
Composting is a form of source reduction that involves the mixing of vegetable and organic refuse in order to speed the natural decomposition into fiber and micronutrients. For example, a compost pile in one's backyard recycles food scraps and lawn clippings that are deposited and mixed periodically. The decomposed product can then be used as fertilizer for the garden. Organic waste gives off energy in the form of heat when microorganisms metabolize the waste, causing it to lose between 40 and 75 percent of its original volume. After decontamination and refinement processes have been completed, the finished product is often used in landscaping, land reclamation, landfill cover, farming, and for nurseries. About one-quarter of household trash is organic material—food and yard waste.
Composting is a particularly promising method of disposal of household wastes in developing countries and is also very advanced in Europe. Yard waste is a prime candidate for composting due to its high moisture content. Because compost contains moisture and micronutrients, slows soil erosion, and improves water retention, it is an alternative to the use of environmentally dangerous chemical fertilizers. According to the EPA report Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures, approximately 50 percent of the U.S. population is subject to state legislation discouraging the disposal of yard trimmings. The tonnage of yard trimmings dumped in land-fills has declined, most likely because such legislation prompts more people to use backyard composting and mulching lawn mowers.
Recovery
The terms "recovery" and "recycling" are often used interchangeably. Both mean that an item is not discarded as trash, but reused in some way. Recovery reduces the amount of garbage requiring disposal, thus saving landfill space and conserving the energy that would be used for incineration. Recovery also reduces environmental degradation and chemicals that pollute water resources, generates jobs and small-scale enterprise, reduces dependence on foreign imports of metals, and conserves water. Some analysts claim that more than half of consumer waste could be economically recycled.
However, recycling sometimes requires more energy and water consumption than waste disposal. It depends on how far the materials must be transported and what is necessary to "clean" them before they can be reused. Demand for some recyclable materials is weak, making them economically unfeasible to recycle in a market-driven society.
According to the EPA's report 68 million tons of MSW was recycled in 2001, up from 33.2 million tons in 1990. (See Figure 4.9.) This was an average recycling rate of 1.3 pounds per person per day. Recycling rates for various materials are shown in Figure 4.10 for 2001 and previous years dating back to 1970. Automobile batteries are the most frequently recycled item with a recycling rate of 94 percent in 2001. Recycling for all other materials shown has increased dramatically since 1970.
Every state has some type of recycling program. The oldest recycling law is the Oregon Recycling Opportunity Act, passed in 1983 and put into effect in 1986. A growing number of states require that many items sold must be made from recycled products. According to the American Forest and Paper Association Web site (http://www.afandpa.org/) at least 12 states require that recycled paper be used to make newspapers; many require that recycled materials be used in making telephone directories, trash bags, glass, and plastic containers. Most states have goals to recycle from 25 to 70 percent of MSW. Rhode Island (70 percent) and New Jersey (60 percent) have the highest recycling goals of all the states; Maryland had the lowest (20 percent). More than 30 states bar some recyclable materials from being thrown into landfills. These include car and boat batteries, grass cuttings, tires, used oil, glass, plastic containers, and newspapers. Almost all books and pamphlets printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office are printed on recycled paper.
Incineration
Some observers think incinerators are the best alternative to landfills. The EPA reported that, in 2001, nearly
FIGURE 4.9
Municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling rates, 1960–2001
15 percent of MSW in the United States was burned. (See Figure 4.7.) When an incinerator burns waste, it reduces the amount of garbage. About 75 percent of the weight of the garbage burns off. Some incinerators do more than burn garbage; by using the heat from the burning garbage to make energy, they can also be waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities. WTE incinerators are preferred over older incinerator models because they use an improved combustion process, have better pollution-control technology, and produce energy from trash. Table 4.3 shows the number of WTE facilities in each state in 2002. There were 107 WTE plants in the United States that year, most in Minnesota, Florida, and New York.
Incinerators are very expensive to build. The country's largest incinerator, in Detroit, Michigan, cost $438 million in 1988. This huge incinerator produces enough steam to heat half of Detroit's central business district and enough electricity to supply 40,000 homes. However, most experts agree that energy recovery from MSW has the potential for making only a limited contribution to the nation's overall energy production. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal for waste-derived energy at 2 percent of the total supply by 2010.
During the operation of a typical incinerator, trucks dump waste into a pit; the waste is moved to the furnace by a crane; and the furnace burns the waste at a very high temperature, heating a boiler that produces steam for generating electricity and heat. Ash collects at the bottom of the furnace where it is later removed and dumped in a landfill. (See Figure 4.11.)
Most experts believe that incineration can never serve as a primary method of garbage disposal because it
FIGURE 4.10
Recycling rates for various materials, 1970–2001
produces (1) residue that must then be transferred to a landfill, and (2) poisonous gases, primarily dioxin and mercury, which are increasingly being found to be dangerous. Incineration may, however, be useful to augment landfill and recycling. WTE plants also have these problems. Mercury is largely impossible to screen with pollution-control devices such as scrubbers (an air pollution device that uses a spray of water or reactant to trap pollutants). In the process of burning paints, fluorescent lights, batteries, or electronics, mercury is released as a gaseous vapor that is poisonous to humans and to the environment. Most of the first incinerators built have been retired because they failed to meet subsequent air quality standards. Some analysts are not satisfied that the emissions problems have been solved, especially the problems of burning materials containing chlorine. Chlorine molecules, when burned, create dioxin, a known carcinogen (cancer-causing agent).
Regulators are also concerned about the acid gases and heavy metals released from WTE plants. Scrubbers reduce but do not eliminate these emissions. Even when the toxic elements are largely removed from emissions, the resulting ash is still toxic and, when put in landfills, can leach into the groundwater. Thus, toxic compounds in incinerator ash are simply removed from one environmental medium to enter another. Toxic compounds still end up in the soil. By law, toxic residue created by burning waste in incinerators must be treated as hazardous waste and must not be dumped in ordinary landfills.
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