Solid Waste Disposal Act

Problems of Waste

Congress specified two primary reasons for the SWDA. First, technological developments were causing a rapid increase in the amount of solid and hazardous wastes being created around the country. Second, because of the population explosion in the nation's metropolitan neighborhoods, urban areas experienced significant financial, management, and technical problems associated with waste disposal.

Whereas most wastes historically might have decomposed over time and become benign, the nation now faced the reality that its great industrial and technological progress brought with it waste products that increasingly did not decompose and contained toxic materials. At the same time, the emergence of cheap, single-use products was further transforming U.S. society from a Depressionera ethic of conservation and reuse into a culture of consumption and disposal enabled particularly by the advent of plastic. Coupled with urbanization and rising income levels, this shift in the character of consumption and waste was creating increasing problems, particularly for cities. Even though the quantity and types of waste being generated were advancing rapidly, technology and policy to manage these wastes were not keeping up. The primary advance to date was the advent of so-called sanitary landfills in 1959, where new waste was covered with soil each day to contain smell and rodents. However, this did little more than combat the aesthetic problems of waste, leaving the more fundamental issues of comprehensive waste management and pollution unsolved.

Historically, waste had been seen primarily as a local issue, and environmental concerns focused on the conservation of resources and sensitive lands. This paradigm began to change with the nascent environmental movement of the early 1960s, which recast waste as part of a larger web of interrelated threats to human health and the environment. No longer was trash just a nuisance that could be dumped outside the city limits and forgotten, but rather it became recognized as a source of pollution that could contaminate groundwater when buried, foul the air when openly burned to save landfill space, or impair rivers and oceans when dumped there.

SWDA

Leaders began to realize the need for more state and federal intervention to deal with the problem of waste, particularly given the downstream effects of air and water pollution and the lack of adequate technology to prevent it. Through the SWDA, the federal government made its first major foray into waste management by boosting funding for research and development to help localities better coordinate response to what was now a national problem. The act was administered by various entities in the Departments of Interior and Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) until these functions were consolidated into the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970.

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