Page 59 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

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30 Waste Management Practices: Municipal, Hazardous, and Industrial
(Bettmann, 1974; Alexander, 1993). Another difficult issue of this period, owing to their numbers
and size, was the disposal of carcasses of dead horses and cattle.
Waste collection at the public’s expense began in 1856, and, in 1895, the District of Columbia
passed a bill for the construction of incinerators. The incinerators, however, were employed only
during winter months. During summer, wastes were placed onto flat-bottomed boats called scows,
and transported to a site south of Alexandria, Virginia, for final disposal (Figure 2.5).
During the mid-1800s, health conditions in major American cities were declared deplorable. A
New York City citizen, George Strong, noted in his diary in 1852 (Kelly, 1973):

Such a ride uptown! Such scalding dashes of sunshine coming in on both sides of the choky, hot railroad
car. … Then the feast of fat things that come reeking filth that Center Street provided in its reeking,
fermenting, putrefying, pestilential gutter! I thought I should have died of the stink, rage, and headache
before I got to Twenty-first Street.

That New Yorker, however, actually loved the city despite its overall “civic filthiness.”
U.S. public health officials, observing the progress in Europe, made requests for improved dis-
posal of garbage and “night soil” (i.e., human excrement). Despite the complaints of sanitary engi-
neers, journalists, and others, the state of refuse collection and disposal in the United States in the
1880s and early 1890s remained poor. Methods were inconsistent, technology was primitive, and
the public, as a whole, did not seem to be concerned (Wilson, 1977). In Chicago, St. Louis, Boston,
and Baltimore, much of the wastes were simply carted to open dumps. In New York, street teams
collected the garbage where it was carted away by open horse-drawn wagons (with the horses foul-
ing the streets during collection) to barges fated for dumping 25 miles offshore. This practice was
still an improvement over older methods. Prior to 1872, the city used simple dumping platforms
built over the East River to unload the city’s wastes. Given the relatively closed position of the

FIGURE 2.5 Unloading garbage from scows off the Atlantic Coast. According to George Waring: “About
twenty Italians unload the cargo of a deck-scow in about two and one half hours. In 1896 over 760,000 cubic
yards of refuse were disposed of in this manner, on 1531 scows.”