Page 61 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

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32 Waste Management Practices: Municipal, Hazardous, and Industrial

FIGURE 2.7 Rag pickers removing materials of value from waste. (Reproduced with the kind permission
from the New York City Municipal Archives.)

Due to the sanitary problems generated by the intensive industrialization and urbanization of
the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, modern solid waste management programs
emerged in the 1890s (Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989). Reformers called for city control over the col-
lection of urban wastes. Prior to that point, waste was considered primarily the individual’s respon-
sibility with minor government participation. This lack of governmental input served to exacerbate
the expanding accumulation of garbage in the streets. Europe, had, by this time, already developed
relatively sophisticated disposal systems and technologies. As late as 1880, only 43% of all U.S.
cities provided some minimum form of collection (McBean et al., 1995). Just 24% of the cities sur-
veyed maintained municipally operated garbage collection systems, and an additional 19% con-
tracted out for the service (Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989). A 1902 MIT survey of 161 U.S. cities
showed that 79% provided regular collection of wastes. By 1915, 89% of major American cities had
some kind of waste collection system, and by 1930 virtually all large cities had waste collection
services (Tammemagi, 1999).
New York City took the lead in handling municipal waste management and promoting overall
civic cleanliness. Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., a Civil War veteran and the individual responsible
for the establishment of a municipal sewer system in Memphis, Tennessee, served as the city’s
Commissioner of the Department of Street-Cleaning from 1895 to1898. One of Waring’s first steps
in managing the city’s wastes was to establish a systematic classification scheme. He encouraged,
at homes and businesses, segregation of organic refuse, ash, and general rubbish fractions into sep-
arate bins. He then contracted for as much recovery of salable materials from the wastes as possi-
ble, making a profit from this phase of the operations (Figure 2.8). Reduction processes were
developed, for example, for the extraction from the wastes of by-products such as ammonia, glue,
grease, and dry residues for fertilizer (Figure 2.9). The city obtained substantial revenue by sal-
vaging these materials (Melosi, 1973).