(Subsequently the following letters were submitted for the record:) Mr. THOMAS P. SMITH City Engineer, City Hall, Tallahassee, Fla. AUGUST 4, 1969. DEAR MR. SMITH: I wish to express my appreciation to you for your assistance during the Committee's recent hearings in Jacksonville on S. 2005, the Resource Recovery Act of 1969. Your testimony was very informative and helpful. Enclosed is a copy of the hearing transcript of your testimony which is being prepared for publication. Your assistance in reviewing your presentation and, where appropriate, editing it for clarity would be appreciated. In reviewing the transcript, additional questions have occurred which I would like to direct to you at this time: 1. What do you consider are the special features of the Tallahassee solid waste management program that have resulted in the success of the effort while other communities of comparable size appear to be having such great difficulties? 2. Does the city now charge a service fee and what do you estimate the rate that would make the operation self-sustaining? 3. The hearings are concerned with S. 2005, the Resource Recovery Act of 1969, which emphasizes the need to develop long-term solutions to the solidwaste disposal problems facing Tallahassee and the Nation. Resource recovery and waste management are suggested solutions, but success depends upon knowing the characteristics of the wastes to be disposed of. In your operation do you now or do you plan to make estimates of the nature of the wastes you are required to handle, either in terms of— 1. Volumes involved, 2. Weights involved, 3. Composition or makeup, 4. Sources of origin? Your response by August 15, 1969, will allow us to meet our projected publication schedule. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to you and the many others who made our stay in Jacksonville pleasant. With kind regards, Truly, JENNINGS RANDOLPH, Chairman. AUGUST 20, 1969. Senator JENNINGS RANDOLPH, Chairman, Committee on Public Works, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. DEAR SENATOR RANDOLPH: I have reviewed the enclosed copy of my testimony given on June 23, 1969 in Jacksonville, Florida. I have made some minor corrections to this copy, which is enclosed. In answer to the questions asked in your letter dated August 4, 1969 I am happy to reply the following: 1. The special features of the Tallahassee solid waste management program which may differ from cities of similar size are use of idle municipal airport property, which is unusable for other purposes because of aircraft operations, as sanitary landfill areas; collection of non-putresible waste material separately for the purpose of reducing disposed volume through salvage; removal of privately owned abandoned automobiles at no cost to the owner; providing free sand to contractors from the trash dumping area to reduce land area requirements. 2. The City of Tallahassee does not charge a service fee for use of the sanitary landfill or trash dump. However, a fee of 20 cents per cubic yard or 90 cents per ton would have to be charged to make this operation self-sustaining. 3. We are currently making estimates of waste volumes for disposal, but we do not presently know the weights involved; the composition or makeup; the sources of origin. We do plan to obtain this information as our program develops. Very respectfully yours, Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Harding. You will summarize these as far as you can? THOMAS P. SMITH, Sanitary Engineer. STATEMENT OF CHARLES I. HARDING, REYNOLDS, SMITH & HILLS, JACKSONVILLE, FLA. Mr. HARDING. I will summarize as quickly as I can because the hour is late. Senator and members of the staff of the committee, it is a pleasure to be here. I would like to say first that the Federal Research Development Demonstration matching grant dollars in my judgment are some of the best spent that you have. I think more good comes out of them that can be directly attributable or directly traced to other Federal programs. I am very pleased with S. 2005 in that it plans to increase that activity. I would point out, though, that technology is evolutionary rather than dramatic. The space program has come up with millions of new adjectives about breakthroughs, new vistas, but the price tag associated with the development of the space program is beyond the realm of our R. & D. program in solid waste. In fact, until the Solid Waste Act of 1965 there was virtually no solid waste research other than that by equipment manufacturers. That 1965 act prompted a great deal of R. & D., which I would like to discuss rather briefly for you. DEMONSTRATION GRANTS One limitation, however, that has evolved on the full implementation of the intent of that act in my judgment is the regulations or the regulation promulgated by HEW, which prevented research and demonstration grants from going to private organizations, thereby HEW precluded a major section of the research and development community from participating directly in this intensively needed area. There is a section in the 1965 act which you propose to retain which reads: Any grant agreement or contract made or entered into under this section shall contain provisions effective to insure that all information, uses, processes, patents, and other developments resulting from any activity pursuant to such grant, agreement or contract will be made readily available on fair and equitable terms to industries utilizing methods of solid waste disposal and industries engaging in furnishing devices, facilities, equipment and supplies to be used in connection with so-called waste disposal * * It is my contention that this provision of the act is an adequate safeguard to the future of solid waste R. & D., and that the HEW regulations preventing private enterprise from participating in R. & D. grants are unnecessary. Senator RANDOLPH. Well, now, just a moment on this point. I want to be clear for members of the staff. We can give grants now, can't we? Contracts With Private Organizations Mr. ROYCE. I believe, Mr. Chairman, that the Department interprets its authority not to give grants. They do write contracts with private profitmaking organizations. Senator RANDOLPH. Well, you clarified that for me. I should have Can you use contracts as if they were grants? Can you work this out? Mr. HARDING. It is more difficult, Senator. It is more difficult. Mr. HARDING. The contract funds by appropriation are much more limited than the grant funds are. There are certain things which are earmarked in the act, in your Appropriations Act, for grants, certain others for contracts. Thereby you preclude private enterprise from participating in the whole grant portions of the act. Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Royce, I will ask you to comment at this point on what we are planing on doing in connection with this S. 2005. Grants by FWPCA Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Committee on Public Works of the Senate has initiated, as you know, Mr. Chairman, authority for the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration to give grants to private profitmaking organizations. Such authority has been included in the Air Quality Act, the Clean Air Act Amendments. This is somewhat over the resistance of the tradition of the Public Health Service, and the committee is looking at the prospect of similar authority in solid waste research and development efforts. Your testimony will be helpful in this regard. Senator RANDOLPH. Yes. I am concerned about what you are saying here and that is why I am using this time to clarify it for myself, though perhaps my experience here is a reflection, something I might bring to the committee. Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Chairman, if I may. Senator RANDOLPH. Yes. Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Richard Vaughn, the director of the Bureau of Solid Waste, is listening interestedly to this interchange. He is in the room. We haven't asked that he testify in these hearings, but we will certainly want to when we have our Washington hearings on this topic. Senator RANDOLPH. Thank you for calling attention to his presence and his listening to the testimony today. Mr. Harding, you may proceed. Mr. HARDING. Mr. Chairman, I submit that this one aspect will gain additional importance as the tax bills are developed; because if private not-for-profit organizations are taxed, as is anticipated, then many of these may become profitmaking organizations and this would further reduce the not-for-profit R. & D. community. I don't want to belabor the point, but that is a factor that I believe should be considered. Collection Collection, as has been pointed out today, gets about four-fifths of the budget of solid waste, and a minority share of the R. & D. efforts. In my judgment collection is a major area that needs attention, and it is going to need more attention in the future, because there are objections to the size of vehicles. Mr. Hennig mentioned the size of the vehicles which they are using, front-end packers in Orlando, over 20-yard size. These are very large and they are going to be more and more undesirable on residential streets. There is going to be more objection to noise created by collection vehicles and refuse collection for this reason. Some of the most promising research and development in the entire country today is in the area of pneumatic collections and alsopipeline transportation of solid waste. Both pneumatic and pipelineor slurry transportation of solid waste will have a tendency to reduce the number of collection vehicles and the number of personnel required for collection. Pneumatic Systems The pneumatic systems which Mr. Hennig mentioned as going into Disney World are also in use in hospitals. The new $20 million Duval Medical Center has a pneumatic refuse collection system designed into it. All of the technology now exists for the use of these systems in high-rise apartments, and even in medium-density apartments, such as garden apartments which are so prevalent. There needs to be demonstration projects in the near future_on pneumatic collection systems for neighborhoods or urban areas, so that this type of collection, which does not rely on collection vehicles nor manual pickup, can have an adequate technological and economic review. Senator RANDOLPH. We think that is feasible. Studies have already gone forward in connection with the gas incinerator that I mentioned here earlier today. Mr. HARDING. Right. These areas have demonstration projects to get them out of the realm of research and development and into the realm of practice I just can't really overemphasize the importance of them, because, until they are practiced on a full scale, all the bugs don't emerge. Application to HUD To answer a question you raised earlier, Senator, on demonstration projects, you asked why Jacksonville applied to HUD rather than to the Bureau of Solid Waste Management. Frankly, the odds of getting money are better. Senator RANDOLPH. Go right ahead, sir. Don't stumble on that statement. Mr. HARDING. There were only three acres in the Southeast which were eligible for applying under that HUD program for funds. So there were many, many others under this office of Bureau of Solid Waste. One aspect that does need more attention is the development of good cost data by cities. This may be accomplished by small grants to cities for putting on extra staffs so that the cities can obtain accurate and comparable cost data. These could be tied in very well with the statistical data treatment system that is now being set up by the Bureau of Solid Waste Management, but the cities themselves often do not have the personnel, nor talent assigned to the job of getting these costs out. That is one lacking area-good cost data and cost alternates, on different types of land fill, different types of collection. These types of data are badly needed by the communities in studies to select the best procedures. Land-Fill Method Least Expensive Sanitary land fill is the least expensive of the currently accepted disposal methods. However, there has been relatively little effort in One of the biggest problems of land fills right now is that they are not preplanned. They are usually hand-to-mouth operations in that the city buys only enough land to last it 2 or 3 years rather than taking long-range view of solid waste disposal and buying large tracts of land. Toward that end I would hope that the committee would recommend that their matching grant program be expanded so that some of these moneys could be used for site acquisition. I think that would permit cities to buy large enough tracts of land to undertake really meaningful land-fill programs. Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Harding, you may not believe it, but in West Virginia where we have the mountains and the valleys, we have problems in the construction of our airports. We used a sanitary land fill for an extension of a runway and it worked. It shows that there are possibilities here. Mr. HARDING. There certainly are, Senator. Such opportunities need exploring, because we have used land fills not as a mains of reclaiming land Senator RANDOLPH. That is right. Mr. HARDING (Continuing). Only as a means of getting rid of garbage or dumping garbage. This area has really suffered, I think. Composting Composting has gained a lot of appeal. It really has a lot of romantic appeal because it promises recovery or recycle versus waste. Unfortunately the people who buy fertilizer haven't been as romantically inclined and it hasn't sold. I say it is unfortunate because I think it is going to prejudice composting as a method of disposal. However, I do see one possibility that has been overlooked. If you were to calculate the land area used for rights-of-way of streets, thoroughfares, for parks, for public areas in a city or community, you would find an appreciable quantity of land. If each acre of that received a good healthy dose of compost as a top dressing, that would provide a pretty healthy market for this end product. Composting is economically competitive with incineration, without the air pollution aspects, but everybody bemoans the fact that nobody buys the compost. If we could then use it for public land applications, it might actually be a better method of recycling. Another aspect of some interest is the use of land for compost acceptor; that is, compose refuse and apply it in much greater quantities than normally would be applied. This, I think, has some merit. The land then could be pulled off of compost duty and assigned to commercial, residential, or industrial uses when it became valuable enough for that purpose and still not insult the community in the doing. INCINERATION There are some very good research programs underway on pyrolysis of waste which provide char and burnable gases. This pyrolysis process could be coupled later with the high-temperature incineration process that melts the residue for slag which is a standard building aggregate. Many of such processes could be coupled together. As you mentioned, gas turbine is one excellent example. Incineration has been largely a garbage cooking operation for years, but recently the Germans have come up with a level of sophistication that I think certainly warrants our exploration—a heat recovery incinerator. |