Resource Recovery Act

History

Maine senator Edmund Muskie introduced both the SWDA and the RRA. Muskie's enthusiasm for solid waste legislation was not shared by U.S. President Richard Nixon. Although the president's administration was involved in many aspects of the environment, he never showed much interest in federal involvement in solid waste management. He had requested much less money for the issue in his own budget. Consequently, although the House of Representatives and the Senate unanimously passed the Resource Recovery Act, most members of Congress expected the president to pocket veto the bill in October 1970, letting it become law without his signature. The president surprised everyone, however, when on the night before the RRA would be enacted with or without his support, he signed the bill into law. Nixon's support for funding resource recovery endeavors still continued to be spotty. In 1972 and 1973, both the president and the EPA continued to submit budgets requesting far less money for solid waste management than the RRA allotted, frustrating many members of Congress who continued to support resource recovery throughout the decade.

The notion of recovering the resources lost in garbage was extremely popular with Americans in the early 1970s. In the 1960s, after two decades of unprecedented consumption, Americans had begun to worry if there was enough room for all of their waste. The proliferation of litter and ever-growing heaps of MSW had caused the federal government to mandate, through the SWDA, that states get involved in what had traditionally been a very local issue. By the late 1960s, however, a vocal group of scientists began warning that a pending population boom would likely create a dire shortage of resources. The RRA created the National Commission on Materials Policy to develop strategies for calculating resource management, and the numerous resource recovery plans the act funded provided the technology meant to ensure maximized use of valuable resources. The 1973 oil crisis shored up support for resource recovery with many politicians and their constituents, who believed that using waste as a source of energy was just good sense.

Section 208 of the act provided funding for different recovery methods. The two most common types of resource recovery funded under the RRA were refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and pyrolysis. In RDF systems, waste was burned in the same facility as another energy source, usually coal. MSW used as fuel could supply 10–20 percent of a city's energy needs. For a brief time, as concern over sulfur dioxide emissions from coal became more prevalent, burning trash was even seen as environmentally helpful. Pyrolysis could be equated to cooking waste. Instead of burning, pyrolysis systems heated waste in an oxygen-deprived chamber until it changed form. Waste undergoing pyrolysis was typically converted to varying amounts of oil, gas, and carbon (or char). These methods, along with most other types of resource recovery, usually utilized recycling techniques, removing metals and sometimes paper before the materials without any other market value were processed. The systems were highly complicated and consisted of many parts. Their complexity doomed most of the plants to failure, as cities could not afford the time or expense involved in repairing them.

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