Pollution Technology

Report Outline
Status of Pollution-Control Technology
Advances in Environmental Protection
Economics of Pollution Technology
Special Focus

Status of Pollution-Control Technology

The emergence of environmental pollution as everybody's issue may be a victory for those foresighted scientists and conservationists whose warnings of impending crisis went unheeded for so many years. But winning popular support for an all-out attack on pollution is but the bare beginning of a solution. A big question is how to go about doing the job. And here the experts often do not agree. An even bigger question is how much people are willing to pay to restore their damaged earth, air, and waterways, and to prevent further depredations. Pay means not only money, which will run into many billions of dollars, but possibly the sacrifice of conveniences and luxuries so familiar as to seem necessities to most Americans.

To date, pleas for a cutback of consumption in the interests of environmental protection have won few converts. It is true that some housewives take their grocery bags and egg boxes back to the supermarket for re-use, and here and there conservation zealots ride bicycles instead of drive cars. But these symbolic gestures do not make a perceptible dent in the pollution problem. The load, in fact, has been growing. Air pollution alone has increased over the past four years from an annual outpouring of 142 million tons of pollutants to more than 200 million. Solid wastes cast off by U.S. municipalities and industries now add up to 360 million tons a year; the total is estimated at 3.5 billion if wastes from agriculture, mining and fossil fuel production are included.

Obviously the solution, at this stage at least, is not being sought in sacrifice. When it is cold, householders will turn up the heat regardless of noxious emissions from power plants; and few couples today deny themselves a baby for the sake of population control. Elaborate packaging and throwaway cans have become luxuries not easily given up. Americans typically look to experts rather than abstinence. Technology made the mess, the prevailing view proclaims, so let technology clean it up. The catch is that clean-up technology must be at an acceptable price. The engineering problems, therefore, are closely tied to the economics of pollution control.