Refuse Disposal, Its Significance^a

Abstract

Approximately 4 pounds of refuse per capita per day are produced in the United States. The term refuse, as used here, refers to the useless, unused, unwanted, or discarded solid waste materials resulting from normal community activities; refuse includes such materials as garbage, rubbish, ashes, street refuse, dead animals, and solid industrial wastes (Anon., 1958). Thus, every day our urban population produces over 400,000,000 pounds of refuse that must be disposed of by dumping on land, grinding and disposal with sewage, incineration or that must be made reusable by one or more reclamation processes. Over 1400 communities dispose of their refuse by sanitary landfill techniques, i.e., compaction and covering with compacted earth on suitable land by use of mechanical equipment such as crawler type tractors (Figure 1). Many thousands more dispose of this material in open dumps on land without the degree of sanitary control recommended by health agencies (Figure 2). Wherever refuse is deposited on land, the potential impact on surface waters or subterranean aquifers may be significant. This can be better appreciated when one considers, for example, that ordinary community refuse may have a 5‐day BOD of 14,000 to 180,000 ppm and an alkalinity (to MO as CaCO3) of 2600 to more than 23,000 ppm, as shown in Table 1 (Anon., 1952a). In one study bacteriological examination of landfill material showed an average of 740,000 coliforms per gram of refuse. The leachate from a landfill has been found to have a 5‐day BOD from 6 to more than 7000 ppm (Carpenter and Setter, 1940; McDermott, 1950). The question is, of course, what does this mean translated into terms of potential ground‐water pollution? And further, when this potential is known, what then are the practicalities involved in present disposal practices and their implications with respect to the development of existing and future ground‐water pollution problems?

Ultimate disposal of waste water concentrates to the environment

“…Organic sludges that decompose slowly cannot be used as fill under buildings, or even playgrounds, if the area is to remain level. Seepage from landfills pollutes surface and ground water (Weaver, 1961).…”