Page 68 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CAT3525_C02.qxd 1/27/2005 10:58 AM Page 39
A Brief History of Waste Management 39
epidemic swept Hamburg, Germany. Communities surrounding the city refused to accept the city’s
cholera-tainted waste, thus forcing the city to build and operate one of Germany’s first waste incin-
erators, designed with the cooperation of English engineers. The incinerator suffered from a range of
initial operating problems. One problem related to the significantly different composition of house-
hold waste in Hamburg compared with that of England (Erhard, 1991; Bilitewski et al., 1997).
During the same period in the United States, construction of mass-burn facilities was not con-
sidered economically justifiable. Allegheny, PA, installed the first municipal incinerator in 1885,
followed by Pittsburgh and Des Moines in 1887 and Yonkers, New York, and Elwood, Indiana, in
1893 (Figure 2.14) (Kelly, 1973). In designing waste incinerators, including mobile and stationary
systems, engineers applied methods that were under development in Europe. It was not until after
1910, however, that incineration came into widespread use in the United States. The so-called
“garbage crematories” appeared throughout the United States (Figure 2.15). Chicago experimented
with both a stationary facility and a traveling incinerator. The latter rolled through the city’s alleys
disposing of refuse as it passed. An intense competition developed between the designers of the
mobile and the stationary furnaces. Out of this “picturesque rivalry grew a startlingly clean condi-
tion of alleys in the city” (Figure 2.16) (Lane, 1894; Melosi, 1973).
The early application of incinerators in the United States, however, included a long list of prob-
lems and failures. Faulty design and construction in addition to inadequate preliminary studies con-
tributed to widespread system malfunctions. Often, U.S. incinerators burned only wet wastes without
the organic materials necessary to maintain combustion. Partly as a result of such initial errors, 102
of the 180 incinerators built in the United States between 1885 and 1908 were abandoned by 1904
(Wilson, 1986; Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989). Shortly afterwards, however, a new generation of
incinerators was being promoted by engineers, and in the decade after 1910 incineration returned to
widespread use. By this time some sanitation experts thought that incinerators would replace open
dumps in smaller communities. A 1924 report indicated that out of 96 cities surveyed, 29% burned
or incinerated their wastes. This compared with 17% that dumped, filled with, or buried wastes; 38%
that used wastes as fertilizer or animal feed; 2% that used reduction; and the remainder that used no
systematic method at all. At its peak in the 1930s to 1940s, between 600 and 700 U.S. cities con-
structed incineration plants. Avoiding some of the earlier design problems, incineration from a sta-
tionary source became a significant method of disposal of municipal wastes (U.S. EPA, 1973;
Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989).

FIGURE 2.14 Diagram of a California sanitary landfill, 1939. (Reproduced with the kind permission from
Engineering News-Record, Copyright Oct. 26, 1939, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., All rights reserved.)