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36 Waste Management Practices: Municipal, Hazardous, and Industrial

FIGURE 2.12 Convicts unloading scows of ashes at Riker’s Island. The ashes were used for fill at the site of
the future prison.

2.7 RECENT WASTE MANAGEMENT INITIATIVES
The management of municipal refuse has, fortunately, changed substantially over the years; the
composition of the U.S. waste has also changed. Some events that significantly altered the charac-
teristics of solid wastes over the past century are shown in Table 2.2.
By the turn of the 20th century, a variety of waste disposal practices were adopted by munic-
ipalities, ranging from land disposal, water disposal (including ocean dumping), incineration,
reduction, or some combination of methods (Table 2.3). With an increase in public awareness,
ocean dumping received the greatest criticism. Dumping wastes in surface waters was seen as
merely shifting one community’s waste to another, with no regard for public health. The pollution
of East Coast and West Coast Beaches forced the passage of federal legislation in 1934 making
the dumping of municipal refuse into the sea illegal. Industries and commercial establishments
were exempted from the regulations, however, and continued dumping into offshore waters
(Vesilind et al., 2002).
From the 1880s to the 1930s, land dumping remained the most common method of waste dis-
posal, regardless of opposition by public health officials and many sanitary engineers (Figure 2.13).
Already by the 1890s, concerns were being raised about the health risks posed by large open dumps.
Sanitary engineers at the time preferred either of two methods — incineration or reduction
(Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989).