A Historical Context of Municipal Solid Waste Management in the United States

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) in the United States is a system comprised of regulatory, administrative, market, technology, and social subcomponents, and can only be understood in the context of its historical evolution. American cities lacked organized public works for street cleaning, refuse collection, water treatment, and human waste removal until the early 1800s. Recurrent epidemics forced efforts to improve public health and the environment. The belief in anticontagionism led to the construction of water treatment and sewerage works during the nineteenth century, by sanitary engineers working for regional public health authorities. This infrastructure was capital intensive and required regional institutions to finance and administer it. By the time attention turned to solid waste management in the 1880s, funding was not available for a regional infrastructure. Thus, solid waste management was established as a local responsibility, centred on nearby municipal dumps. George Waring of New York City organized solid waste management around engineering unit operations; including street sweeping, refuse collection, transportation, resource recovery and disposal. This approach was adopted nationwide, and was managed by City Departments of Sanitation. Innovations such as the introduction of trucks, motorized street sweepers, incineration, and sanitary landfill were developed in the following decades. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA), is the defining legislation for MSWM practice in America today. It forced the closure of open dumps nationwide, and required regional planning for MSWM. The closure of municipal dumps caused a ‘garbage crisis’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Private companies assumed an expanded role in MSWM through regional facilities that required the transportation of MSW across state lines. These transboundary movements of MSW created the issue of flow control, in which the US Supreme Court affirmed the protection of garbage under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Thus MSWM in America today is largely managed by municipalities, and operated by a relatively small number of private companies. It consists of a mixture of landfill, incineration, recycling, and composting, and is regulated under RCRA, the Clean Air Act and other related federal and state laws.