tion plant that will handle all the solid wastes produced by the communities of Escondido and San Marcos, California. The Environmental Protection Agency will provide 75 percent of the funds for the plant, which is scheduled to begin operation in November 1974. Oil from the plant will be sold to the San Diego Gas and Electric Company, which will invest $150,000 of its own for new facilities to handle it. Operating costs for the plant are expected to be a little more than $8 per ton; about 20 percent less than conventional disposal costs in the

area.

A full-scale, 2000-ton-per-day plant to process wastes from a city of 500,000 would cost about $12 million, Garrett estimates. In aroundthe-clock operation at a municipally financed plant, the firm contends, it would cost $5 per ton of refuse to produce oil and other recoverable products worth $6, even with no credit for waste disposal.

Several other groups-including Monsanto Enviro-Chem Systems Inc., St. Louis, Missouri; Torrax Systems Inc., Buffalo, New York; the Union Carbide Research Center, Tarrytown, New York; and Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, Washington-are investigating pyrolysis of wastes to produce primarily char and lowBtu gas. With few exceptions, these processes have been developed principally for volume reduction of solid wastes, and production of gas has not been optimized. The low-Btu gas, furthermore, cannot be transported economically and must be used at the production site, which greatly reduces the viability of such processes.

The city of Baltimore, Maryland, for example, with EPA assistance is planning to install a $14 million, Monsanto-designed pyrolysis facility that will handle 1000 tons of solid waste daily. Fuel gas generated in the process will be burned at the site to produce steam that will be sold to the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company for the production of electricity. Even so, operation of the plant is expected to cost nearly as much as would disposal in a landfill. Furthermore, many conventional waste disposal incinerators throughout the country also generate steam, but have been unable to sell it. Oil production is thus a much more desirable alternative.

Production of methane that could be used interchangeably with natural gas is also a desirable alternative, but the cost of upgrading the low-Btu gas produced by pyrolysis is prohibitive. Methane can, however, be produced by the third major technology, bio-conversion through digestion by anaerobic bacteria. Development of this process is less advanced than the others, but current work suggests that about 10,000 scf of methane could be produced from each ton of solid waste. Anaerobic digestion has been used for many years to reduce and stabilize municipal sewage, and EPA is sponsoring some research for that purpose. Only recently has the National Science Foundation also begun to fund energy-directed digestion research as part of its Research Applied to National Needs (RANN) program.

Although bioconversion is theoretically a simpler process than hydrogenation or pyrolysis, a large number of problems remain to be solved. Among them are the need for new techniques to feed solids into the digesters and inexpensive methods for collection and purification of the methane, recirculation of the effluents, and control of pollution. A

major environmental problem is disposal of the organic sludgewhich may amount to 40 percent of the starting material-that remains after digestion.

This sludge could possibly be dried and burned, but that would produce air pollution problems. It could conceivably be converted to oil or gas through one of the other techniques, but it would then seem more logical to use that technique on all the waste. Or, since the sludge has a high protein content, it might also prove valuable as a raw material for the manufacture of animal feed. Whatever the solution, though, the economics of sludge disposal will play a major role in the overall viability of bioconversion.

If the preliminary investigations suggest that these economics might be favorable, a small NSF-funded pilot plant could be in operation within 5 years, according to the NSF's Lloyd Herwig. A larger, 10- to 100-ton-per-day demonstration plant, possibly funded jointly by federal and local governments and industry, could be in operation in 8 to 10 years. A full-scale commercial plant, he estimates, could be in operation in about 15 years.

From a consideration of energy, each of these conversion methods is severely restricted by the limited amount of solid wastes available. A number of investigators have therefore suggested supplementation of these wastes with algae, phytoplankton, and other plants grown specifically for such use. For now, however, the costs of harvesting and transporting such plants to the conversion facilities appear far too great to justify such an approach. Even on the best land, moreover, the photosynthetic efficiency of farming the amount of incident energy stored in the crop-is rarely above 0.5 percent.

9. "Energy Push Cost Put at $255 Billion," Washington Post, March 12, 1974, p. A-13:

A "maximum" program to produce more energy in this country would cost $255 billion between now and 1980, according to a new Nixon administration study.

But even spending that amount of money and conserving energy still would leave the United States short of oil, according to the internal task force report.

In fact, a predicted shortage of 4.4 million barrels a day in 1980 is only slightly less than the 4.9 million-barrel-a-day shortage the Federal Energy Office is predicting for early 1974 if no Arab oil is imported.

The report indicates that it will take more than money and conservation to achieve President Nixon's stated goal of Project Independence "to ensure that by the end of this decade Americans will not have to rely on any source of energy beyond their own."

The Nixon administration, with an eye to spurring domestic production of energy, is considering a number of incentives to industryincluding subsidizing oil shale and coal gasification operations.

Secretary of Commerce Frederick B. Dent, for example, is circulating among executive agencies a memo that discusses paying producers of synthetic fuel the difference between the market price and produc

tion cost-subsidies the memo puts as high as $98.1 billion over 14

years.

David O. Wood, director of energy systems for FEO and cochairman of the administration's Project Independence task force, said yesterday that the projections in his group's report do not assume such fundamental policy changes as subsidizing a synthetic fuels industry. Studied in that light, Wood said, the findings of the task force report are cause for optimism-not pessimism-about achieving independence in energy.

The report is more optimistic about closing the petroleum gap between supply and demand in 1985 than in 1980, as these two passages from it indicate:

"A program of maximum energy resource development and conservation will reduce reliance or foreign supplies of petroleum to 4.4 million barrels per day in 1980. By 1980, potential non-Arab imports are estimated to be 6.8 million barrels per day, with 3.8 million barrels from the Caribbean and South America.

"By 1985." the report continues, "reliance upon all foreign petroleum supplies can be reduced to 1.5 million barrels per day."

Also, states the report, "our estimates of the petroleum deficit may be further reduced if even greater substitution of other fuels, especially coal, is assumed."

The task force studied various estimates on how much capital would have to be invested between now and 1980 to support an accelerated energy resource development. It came up with a range of from $190 billion to $255 billion in constant 1973 dollars.

A task force official said that the $255 billion would cover the investment in the United States-not such costs as building refineries

overseas.

The United States has the technology in hand to accelerate its production of energy through a $255 billion investment, the official said. But getting the capital looms as a problem in some areas.

"The major problem with development of our coal potentialities in the past," said the report, "has been an inability to secure necessary capital. This could continue to be a problem in the future unless uncertainties in the market for coal are removed."

Besides that problem with developing the abundant supply of coal, the task force noted such energy alternatives as nuclear geothermal, solar and water power would meet only a small part of the total American demand.

This leaves, for the next several years anyway, oil and gas as the main domestic sources of energy. Yet, the report states, the United States will not produce enough for the 1980-1985 period "even when the maximum conservation program is implemented.

"If, however," the task force report concludes, "we can secure agreements providing reliable access to non-Arab sources-in particular, Western Hemisphere sources-then it will be possible to achieve selfsufficiency without significantly affecting our national rate of growth." The report-entitled "United States Energy Self-Sufficiency: An Assessment of Technological Potential"-was prepared last month under the FEO's office of economic and strategic planning.

10. National Association of Recycling Industries, Inc., "Statement Before the Subcommittee on Transportation, House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee on H.R. 6637," March 12, 1974, pp. 21– 25:

Here are some additional examples of how recycling directly impacts energy conservation, all as proved by recent studies made by AEC and EPA:

Aluminum.-It requires less than 3% of the original energy commitments to make a ton of aluminum from recycled metal rather than mined ore. Put another way, the delivery of a ton of aluminum from natural resources requires over 30 times the energy output needed to deliver an equivalent ton from recycled sources.

Currently, a little more than 1,000,000 tons of aluminum are recycled. This represents tremendous energy savings to the nation-but what is more important is the fact that well over 2,000,000 tons of aluminum are not recycled. Currently, recycled aluminum represents less than 30% of our domestic use of this metal. Therefore, the doubling of our current aluminum recycling rate-from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 tons-would represent the savings of 49.38 billion KWH or 29.1 million barrels of oil each year.

Paper-Studies made by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency comparing the environmental impact of utilizing recycled waste paper rather than virgin pulp show energy savings in the range of 60% to 70% in favor of the recycling method. In the manufacture of a product utilizing low grade (post-consumer) waste, the study showed that over 3 times the energy was required to make the same product with virgin pulp. In another paper product area, it required 211⁄2 times the energy to manufacture with virgin fiber as opposed to deinked and recycled waste paper.

Currently, only about 13.000,000 tons out of an annual paper production of over 60.000.000 tons are derived from recycled sources. Yet, it has been confirmed that over 35,000,000 tons of additional waste paper are recoverable for raw material use. The doubling of our current use of recycled paper would represent an energy savings of 55.0 billion KWH or 32.5 million barrels of oil each year.

Further, since paper comprises almost half of the nation's collected solid waste, it represents another important energy source after recyclable materials have been extracted for new raw material uses. The EPA indicates that about 80% of this non-recyclable solid waste is combustible and could be recovered in the form of energy. The EPA has stated: "If energy recovery were practiced in all major urban areas, an estimated quadrillion BTU's of energy could be acquired annually. This quantity of energy is equivalent to . . . the nation's entire energy consumption for residential and commercial lighting.. ... more than half of the direct oil imports from the Middle East. . . . almost 1/3 of the energy that will be delivered by the Alaskan Pipeline.

Steel: It requires 2 to 3 times the energy to manufacture a steel product with virgin ore rather than recycled metal. Every time a ton of steel is produced with virgin ore, rather than with recycled scrap, it costs the nation 8.8 million BTU's of energy.

Yet, each year, only about 13 of the recycled steel available to us in the U.S. is recovered and reused. Each million tons of scrap that is lost as a raw material costs this nation over 8 trillion BTU's of energy and over 1.500.000 barrels of oil.

In this connection. Mr. E. F. Andrews, Vice President, Allegheny Ludlum Industries. Inc.. Pittsburgh, recently summarized the situation in steel production as follows:

To produce a ton of steel from scrap takes only 5.5 million BTU's. But to replace it with a ton of steel from ore takes 18 million BTU's.

Mr. Andrews thereupon proceeded to state that studies made by his company led to these unassailable conclusions: (1) for every ton of recyclable scrap used by a steel company in place of virgin iron ore. the company saves 12.5 million BTU's of energy, and (2) increased utilization of 12 million tons of ferrous scrap each year by the steel industry would result in energy savings equal to 26 million barrels of oil or 150 billion cu. ft. of natural gas. "It's enough energy to meet the electric power needs of Boston, Hartford, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago for the entire year," said Mr. Andrews.

Similar examples can be given for many other recycled commodities including copper, where it has been estimated that it requires only about one-eighth the energy to manufacture a product with recycled copper rather than mined ore.

Further compounding the energy conservation issue is the fact that as our natural resources become more depleted, more energy per net ton is required to extract it from less accessible sources, either of domestic or overseas origins. If one were to factor in all of the energy costs of each future ton of ore compared to a ton of recyclable material, the scales would tip even more heavily in favor of encouraging the use of greater quantities of recyclable materials.

To summarize, therefore, NARI directs the Committee's attention to the following statistics developed by Federal studies which indicate why the recycling legislation which has been pending before this Committee for so long should be adopted without further delay.

1

Aluminum.
Copper..

Tron

Magnesium.

Paper....

Titanium..

ENERGY REQUIREMENTS AND SAVINGS, RECYCLABLE VERSUS VIRGIN MATERIALS UTILIZATION

11. Arsen Darnay, Jr.. Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Minerals, Materials and Fuels, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. Senate (Oct. 30, 1973), p. 122:

Our findings indicate that approximately 80 percent of the total waste generation of 125 million tons annually is combustible and could be recovered in the form of energy. In fact, if energy recovery were