Above: The Onrust – named for the first ship built in North America–after dropping anchor in Long Island’s Conscience Bay. Photo by Sue Dooley.
From Stony Brook’s Waste Management Institute – Solving a Burning Issue by Sue Risoli on the Stony Brook Magazine, Autumn 1987
Johnny Carson joked about it, but it’s no laughing matter.
The odyssey of the infamous barge laden with Long Island trash made headlines and inspired comment from the king of the latenight airwaves. But what Johnny didn’t mention is that every person in this country—adult or child—produces two-thirds of a ton of refuse per year. It takes more than a trip to the trash can—or one wandering barge—to deal with that kind of garbage.
The problem is especially acute in the metropolitan New York City region. Here on Long Island, over three million people depend entirely on groundwater for all their drinking and domestic water needs. That groundwater has already been tainted by landfills. Now state law has mandated that most Long Island landfills be closed by 1990.
What to do with all the garbage? Some towns are building incineration plants to burn it. But the 2,000 tons of ash residue that will result each day from the combustion creates yet another disposal problem.
Still, even as the trash heap grows, there’s hope. Last year the Waste Management Institute was created at Stony Brook’s Marine Sciences Research Center. Housing the Institute there made perfect sense, says Provost Jerry R. Schubel. “The Center has a long history of taking difficult and complex problems and trying to turn them into opportunities,” he notes. “And it’s obvious that one of the most difficult sets of problems relates to waste management. It’s an issue that clouds our economic and environmental future.”
Close up of ash produced by burning solid waste.
A decade ago Marine Sciences researchers stabilized the ash produced by power plants that burned coal to make electricity. This stabilized material was compacted into blocks, and used to form an artificial fishing reef off the Island’s south shore.
Now Waste Management scientists are applying that idea to incineration ash, and trying to find other ways to keep us from getting buried in debris.
Frank Roethel isn’t reluctant to tell people that he works with garbage. Roethel, a veteran of the coal waste reef project, has an office littered with blocks made of combusted, stabilized waste. “I never work with anything I can’t get under my fingernails,” he says, laughing. But he quickly gets serious when he speaks of the need to solve waste disposal problems.
Earlier this year, he spent much of his time looking at the products of incineration plants from throughout New York State. He and his colleagues were searching for material suitable for making into blocks. “You want well-combusted, ‘clean’ stuff,” Roethel says. Poking through some gray, powdery incineration ash, he explains, “Anything you throw in the trash could end up in here. We’ve seen grass clippings, or pieces of local newspapers. But you don’t want that.”
Once the right kind of ash was found, it was brought to the laboratory and made into small, cylindrical”miniblocks” for testing. Roethel and a team of researchers determined whether it would hold up physically and chemically when placed underwater. “It was relatively easy to demonstrate that the blocks are structurally sound,” says Roethel. “What people are really going to be concerned about are the environmental effects.”
So far, no ill effects have been observed in the laboratory. The material was ground up, placed in seawater and shaken for 48 hours. The resulting mixture was used to “innoculate” cultures of tiny marine organisms called phytoplankton. Roethel examined the phytoplankton daily and measured their growth and photosynthetic rates. “We saw no instance of adverse impacts. And these organisms are quite sensitive,” reports Roethel.
Even a “worst-case scenario” proved encouraging. Close-up of ash (also shown above right) produced by burning solid waste. Investigators placed mussels in a mixture of ground-up ash blocks and seawater, where the shellfish filtered the substance through their tissues. Though data are still being collected, so far “we don’t see any negative effects,” Roethel says.
The blocks used for the reef are fabricated off campus, in factories on Long Island and in Michigan. It takes 55 pounds of ash to make one block. In eight seconds, the assembly line can crank out three blocks.
A view from the block: this specimen will end up in an artificial fishing reef.
It was a perfect day for a sail—a bit brisk, perhaps, but the sun was strong and spirits were high. Twenty people—legislators, scientists and crew members— had boarded the Marine Sciences Research Center’s vessel “Onrust” (Dutch for restless.) As Captain Chris Stuebe eased the boat away from its moorings, his passengers shouted good-naturedly to be heard over the whistle of the Port Jefferson ferry.
The occasion wasn’t a pleasure cruise. Researchers were ready to complete their ash reef, with blocks heaved overboard as the ship slowed and halted in Long Island Sound’s Conscience Bay. Swans, the only fauna observed that day, watched disapprovingly. Within two weeks, though, several species of fish had taken up residence in the reef’s nooks and crannies. In the months ahead, Roethel and his colleagues will watch the reef carefully, diving beneath the bay’s surface to examine the blocks and take water samples.
The Waste Management Institute is looking at other uses for the ash formed by combustion of solid waste. It might be used for capping landfills, or in asphalt for the construction of roads, or to chemically stabilize sewage sludge. “We also realized that the material might be suitable for use as a replacement for natural aggregate, in the manufacturing of cement blocks,” says Roethel.
He leans forward and rests his foot on a dark grey slab of cement, two feet tall and one foot wide. “So we made some like this one right here. At first they were only 80 percent of the strength needed for construction quality. Then we changed the mix. Now the blocks meet or exceed structural requirements.”
They’ll also be building a house—not for people, but for boats. The new building will be constructed alongside the Marine Sciences Research Center, out of 400 tons of ash shaped into blocks. ‘The boathouse will be a natural extension of our laboratory,” says Roethel. Soil samples will be taken before and after construction to determine whether the blocks have had an effect on soil chemistry, and the structure itself will be monitored inside and out. Ash blocks may keep coastal areas of New York State from going under—literally. Meteorologists have warned that, as the Earth’s atmosphere is warmed by accumulating carbon dioxide (the “greenhouse effect”), sea level will rise as much as three feet in the next 100 years. Sea-surface temperatures could also rise by about 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Higher ocean temperatures mean that hurricanes will strike with a greater- than-usual punch; wind speeds could increase by 20 to 25 percent.
Captain H. Christian Stuebe guides his ship back to home port at day’s end.
Long Islanders can stave off potential destruction, says Jerry Schubel, by building ash block dikes along already fragile shorelines. “If Long Island burned all its garbage, we’d have enough ash to build 15 million ash bricks a year, enough to circle the Island 8 to 10 times a year,” Schubel adds. The blocks could also be used to build offshore islands for power plants, he suggests.
There’s more to waste than trash. Hospitals, laboratories and, to a lesser degree, private physicians’ offices, generate infectious waste that must be disposed of safely. Concerns raised in recent months about disposal of waste produced by hospitals in the region have focused even greater attention on the need for a solution that’s environmentally acceptable and economically feasible. “Next year, University Hospital here at Stony Brook will spend $600,000 on disposal of infectious waste,” says Robert A. Francis, vice president for campus operations. “We must find a way to keep costs down, for us and for other institutions that face this problem.”
Officials agree that landfills are not the solution. But incineration is tricky; byproducts must be safe. Even the plastic bags that most infectious waste is packaged in are hard to get rid of, since the plastic is not biodegradable and doesn’t burn cleanly.
The Waste Management Institute, searching for ways to solve the problem, hosted a conference on infectious refuse several months ago. More are planned, so that researchers can work with hospitals and state agencies to define safe, affordable procedures for disposal.
Reusing garbage may help clean things up. The Insutute is now seeking funding to begin recycling close to home, right on the Stony Brook campus.
Paper accounts for 30 percent of all solid waste; 20 percent of the paper used in the United States is recycled. The Institute would like to recycle some of that paper at the source—employee wastebaskets. It’s proposing to STOP (Save That Office Paper) paper waste with 700 STOP TOPS. These would be attached to standard wastebaskets. Paper would go into one opening (other office trash into another) and be held in a separate receptacle. WMI estimates that a pilot project involving 700 employees could result in a net benefit of $7,000—between revenue from recycling and avoidance of waste disposal costs.
The Waste Management Institute awaits arrival in September of new director R. Lawrence Swanson, who has served as director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Marine Pollution Assessment, and as director of the New York Bight Marine Ecoystems Analysis Project. As he takes over from acting director Schubel, he’ll already have some friends: “Friends of Waste,” that is. They’re an interdisciplinary group formed on campus to brainstorm about waste management and develop new initiatives.
Last year Jerry Schubel and Homer A. Neal, his predecessor as provost, wrote a book titled Solid Waste Management and the Environment. In it they quoted poet Shel Silverstein’s ode to “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, who would not take the garbage out.” Poor Sarah alienated friends and neighbors with her slovenly ways, and ultimately met her demise in a pile of obnoxious debris that spread “across the state from New York to the Golden Gate.”
The Waste Management Institute is here to remind us—all of us who generate waste—that it’s time to take the garbage out.
