By ATHELSTAN SPILHAUS

M

TY TITLE may give the false impression that I don't agree with the last speaker about the crisis nature of the situation in our environment. I agree completely. It is only that I suggest certain directions in order to begin to cope with this crisis. These directions, when you hear them, will sound very simple, very obvious, but they will require tremendous changes, politically; they will require public action, changes in our way of thinking about our economy; they are much more complicated than they sound, I'm afraid, in my simple words.

The topic assigned to me is "Waste Management and Control"-what do we do about this? If technology made this mess, what can technology, with public help, do to clean it up?

I think that the first thing we have to face is that everything that has been done so far simply whittles at the problem but does not really cut into it. We need some completely new thinking and some step jumps; we need to face this problem and take the kinds of risks that we would take in the crisis of war. Why is it that governments will take risks in war, and won't take corresponding risks for their people living in a crisis situation?

There are three bad ways of disposing of solid wastes and all three are equally bad. If you burn your wastes you foul the atmosphere, the rain comes along and washes it down into the land and pollutes the land; if you put it in the water, it ultimately goes into the sediments and it is very difficult to recover that. You may use it as landfill, but we are rapidly running out of space for landfill.

We have to realize that this is a system in which each thing that's done affects other parts of the

Talk given at the opening session of the conference on Crisis in the Environment: The Scientists' Responsibility, sponsored by the Scientists' Institute for Public Information, May 12-14, 1967.

Barry Commoner. "Duty of Science in the Ecological Crisis." See Scientist and Citizen, October, 1967.

I include noise, smell and waste heat as pollutionas waste that needs to be managed or controlled. I recently saw a building on Park Avenue-one of these glass boxes. They were tearing up the street outside, of course. The architect asked me if it wasn't beautiful from the outside. I couldn't hear him, fortunately. Inside, in order to preserve the open space and the beautiful visual environment, he had kept the walls down low. Of course the office racket added to the racket of the street, beautifully transmitted through the glass. So it was the environment of a boiler factory. I told him later when we managed to get where we could talk that only the stone deaf could have enjoyed the visual experience.

In Philadelphia, the planners have done a magnificent job in preserving some of the old houses. They are quite beautiful, but I couldn't stand it for long because the wind was in the wrong direction that day

and the stench of the oil refineries was such that you could only enjoy that visual environment if you had a gas mask.

These things that we are talking about negate the purposes of the city and these are the things that are causing people to flee the city. The city was a beautiful thing where people could meet face to face and have social, business, and cultural confrontations and many enjoyable experiences with a minimum of travel. But because of the way we have fouled our own nest with all these pollutants, including things like noise and waste heat, people flee the cities and become nomads again travelling back and forth to the suburbs.

We need new thinking and daring experimentation, and we need even a change in our vocabulary. What do we mean by waste disposal? What do we do when we dispose of waste? Do we throw it away? There is no "away" any more. It's like the lady who was asked what she did with her garbage. She was rather a lazy housekeeper. She said she just kicked it around until it got lost. But that is exactly what sanitary engineering people have been doing for centuries. The trouble is there is no place for it to get lost any more. There are too many of us.

We need to approach two very simple ideas. If there is no place to put it-if we cannot dispose of it and if we cannot use it-we had better not just spread it around like the lazy housewife. The first interim step and one that we must move to rather immediately is control of pollutants, whatever they may be; whether they be lethal chemicals or whether they be noise which may cause mental illness-the control of these pollutants at the source. That is the first simple thing. How do you start controlling things at the source? Many things have been suggested. What about glass bottles? You read on certain glass bottles that Federal

BURPA COLA

NO-RETURN NO MORE

NO NO-RETURN

law forbids their reuse. I think that this should be changed so that Federal law forbids their not being returned and reused. Maybe we should tax them by their half life-the time it takes a tin can to half rust away. But in any case, we inust find some controls at the source, and control at the source need not merely be these ways of discouraging wastes that are strewn around, but control at the source means collecting wastes at the source before it is strewn around.

Regardless of what any economist tells me, I'm convinced by the second law of thermodynamics that it must be cheaper to collect something at the source than to scrape it off the buildings, wash it out of the clothes, and so forth.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us among other things that as a product moves through a series of changes, it loses some energy in each change. In order to reconstitute the product in a more complex, more useful form, new energy must be introduced -as heat, as man-hours of work, or in some other form. Even if what we want to do is simply regain parts of the original product that have been dispersed, rather than actually to reconstitute it, this is true. The earlier in the series of changes the new energy is introduced, the less energy will have been lost and the less new energy is required. Therefore, it must be cheaper in energy (and energy costs money) to collect waste at the source before it has undergone a long series of changes and dispersals. This is a kind of complete rethinking in economics.

The second thing that we must move towards, if we are going to do anything about this crisis situation, is to aim at complete recycling of the things we use This means an even greater change in our thinking. We now have a great system that is based on a consumer economy. We think our civilization improves

when the consumption increases. But we forget, most of us, that there is no such thing as a consumer. We are pleased when our standard of living goes up because it means that more poundage or tonnage of stuff is put into every consumer's hands every year. But we forget that he really consumes nothing. He uses it and then he discards exactly the same mass of material that we put into his hands.

We must change our conception of the consumer and talk about him as a user. Then we can think of recycling the material he uses. The most conspicuous thing to think of recycling is the automobile. We have a magnificient system to dig stuff out of the ground, refine iron and other metals, make it into a complex piece of machinery, and produce an automobile that costs only as much per pound as coffee. Then we have a magnificient marketing system, a tremendous mass distribution system, to put this car into the hands of the consumer. Well, he uses it a little bit, fouls the atmosphere with it a little bit, and then he and our whole system forget about it. Can we have a mass collection system, a mass disassembly plant, and massively reuse used automobiles? Can we adopt this as a basic concept of our economy? This would take a little reorganization of American industry, but it is the only ultimate solution. That is why this is a crisis situation because people must become aware that this is the only solution, and that whittling will do no good.

We can reuse some of our waste heat, and at the same time control some of our pollution by burning refuse in modern incinerators which do not permit the smoke or effluents to go into the air, and at the same time use the heat for power production. In this way we would be controlling the wastes at the source and going the further way of using the heat for a useful purpose.

The way toward recycling is a long one, and there will be many things that we will not be able to reuse. There are many things that it is obvious we can reuse now, but many that we don't know yet how to reuse. In the meantime, we should still collect these at the source, segregate them and store them where we can get at them, for two reasons: if we store them where we can get at them, then we know where they are so we know they are not doing us any harm; secondly, as things progress, we may find a way to use them, and then we can mine them. Before we have worked out a way to recycle the automobiles we ought to make an Alfred P. Sloan Memorial Mountain of junked automobiles somewhere in the flat land which we could use for skiing on in the meantime and mine when our high grade iron ores give out. And this is not a joke. In Johannesburg, South Africa, when they first mined gold, they dumped the waste right next to the mine shaft, building great slag dumps. Then when

the cyanide process came along they used them. There was enough gold left in those dumps so it was worth reprocessing them. Years and years later they found there was some uranium in the dumps and they processed them a third time. Of course, it was not by design that they concentrated these things; it was just plain laziness, but because they were concentrated, they could be reused.

So the final thing is to design for recycling or design things to be degradable in a way which will be useful and not harmful to the soil.

These are the simple aims that we need to work toward in this waste management and control. These are the only ways I know of controlling waste. Difficult as it may be to introduce control at the source and recycle, it would be much more difficult to persuade people that they must use less and less of everything, lowering their standard of living. That is the only other way I know of meeting this crisis situation.

There will be benefits from this. Supposing we suc ceed in cleaning up the pollution. Supposing there is no smog. Imagine the dream situation of a city with

no smog, dirty water, smells, noise or congestion. The benefits of this would cure many of our urban problems. For example, we would no longer need zoning. Zoning results from the failure of the city.

You have to zone because industry stinks and nobody wants to live next to it, so they have to live upwind in a suburb somewhere. This necessitates a transportation system. But if we clean the place up then the city regains its original purpose which was for working, living, cultural exchange, recreation, schooling to be in one place. This will reduce the need to travel, which means people will be able to travel only if they wish. It will increase the number of choices people have. The poor who cannot afford to flee from the city will no longer be the only ones living in the city. This is why the pollution problem which I have talked about in a positive sense as the waste management and control problem led me to suggest that we need massive experimentation, and that this experimentation should not be limited to waste management and control, but might even lead to an experimental city where these things can be tried out in conjunction with a total system of a city's needs on a great enough scale to get some answers.

Questions from the audience about the experimental city led to further discussion by Dr. Spilhaus of the reasons for developing it, and the way in which it would be useful to existing cities:

It was from my concern with what one could do in the way of waste management and control that riv attention was drawn to the fact that we simply do not have facilities for trying out massive new technologies This goes much further than the waste management problem. New technologies for transportation cannot be tried in the older cities because they must be physically compatible with the existing systems; then there are legal, institutional and social inhibitions, labor codes and so on which inhibit trying out new technologies.

As the thing grew in my mind, I realized also that we do not have the opportunity in the older cities to introduce the newer communication systems which might or might not be beneficial to city living. If you built a city de novo, every point which we now connect by telephone cable we could rather easily connect. for instance, with broad band coaxial cable. It would cost very little more if you did it from the start. And then we would have a network on which computers, video

machines or even simple telephones or telegraph keys if you like, could be put. But it would have a broad band capability. In this way I came to the concept of providing a massive experimental facility, an experimental city.

This sounds ambitious because it needs people in it too. But when you think that three million people are coming to the United States every year, you realize that this is the equivalent of a dozen cities of a quarter of a million people each. If you think of the world as a whole, the mass production of cities is something tremendous. As a plain old engineer I would not mass produce anything as complicated or as costly as a city without building a prototype. In a way, building a city in which we could try these new techniques is a more modest, more cautious approach than our present way of making a town into a city planlessly, or adding new technology to old cities without trying it out.

More than that, the experimental city would be a place where we could give people a choice of different things which would remove the chores of city living. Without trying such things out, people do not know what they would like. When people do not even know what they can have, how can they make a choice? The idea of the experimental city would also be to see if, with modern technology, we could keep the desirable aspects of a city-the variety of living, working, cultural and educational experiences, and yet keep the size of the population of the city down. It is important because the problem of city living is the fact that the whole complex is too big, and this is very simply illustrated by the question of heat.

In New York City in summer we have this marvelous engineering device called the air-conditioner. This

Athelstan Spilhaus is President of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. As Chairman of the Committee on Pollution, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, he was responsible for the 1966 report, "Waste Management and Control" in which the concept of the experimental city was first developed. Dr. Spilhaus is on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and on S/C's Science Advisory Board.

is nothing but a pump. It pumps the heat from inside the buildings onto the street, so the streets become so unbearable that as soon as people who can afford it leave their air conditioned offices, they flee to the suburbs or if they can get away for the whole summer, they flee to the mountains or the seashore and quit the city altogether. Only the poor have to stay on the hot streets.

I think that one should experiment with waste heat sewers in a city. If a city is small enough, then you get the scouring of the winds, you get the change of air, and the waste heat problem is not as extreme. These are just examples of things that can be tried in such a city.

The question is always asked: Why do you have to have a whole experimental city for this? Can't you try a transportation system here, a sewage system there, a communication system somewhere else? The answer is "No," because each one affects the other. Suppose we have this broad band information carrier service in the city where you charge, like electricity, by the kilo-bit for information. It may be that if people have such a communication system they would not need to travel so much and this would reduce the need for the transportation system. Also, as I mentioned, if you do clean up the noise, and the filth of the factories well, it means that the factories and the schools and the houses can be close together. This again reduces the need for transportation. If transportation is reduced, then those colloidal particles from the tires of the cars will be reduced and the pollution will be reduced. Each interacts with the other, and of course, all these technological things may interact with the way you provide health care, with the way that you provide education, with the way you have police surveillance, and so forth. So you need to consider a city as a system, and this is one reason for the experimental city.

The basic reason we want an experimental city is that nobody knows the answer to city problems, and when you do not know the answers, then you should experiment. One of the problems with cities is that architects build buildings that are monuments to themselves and they build them so that they cannot be taken down except with one of those balls hanging from a crane. We would not do that in an experimental city. In an experiment you expect to make mistakes. We would take down the buildings as a child takes down an erector set, because we would expect that some would be wrong, or that some might be right only for a period of five years. So that it would be totally experimental in nature and would hopefully be a city which could react to the changes in people's wishes and choices.