Solid waste management policy

DEFINITION: Procedures and regulations put in place by communities for dealing with the creation, accumulation, utilization, and eventual deposition of solid waste materials

When the disposal of solid wastes is mismanaged or inadequately addressed, the negative results for the environment can include air, water, and soil pollution. The policies that governments put in place for managing solid waste can thus have wide-ranging impacts.

No internationally recognized definition has been established regarding what constitutes solid waste. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a multinational body, employs a definition that excludes radioactive waste but includes hazardous waste. The federal government of the United States has adopted a definition that excludes most hazardous waste, except that included within municipal waste. Despite these definitional differences, the public policies adopted regarding waste management have been reasonably similar across most economically advanced nations. The purpose behind the definitions has been to identify levels of danger posed by waste materials so that adequate management regimes can be constructed. Materials defined as radioactive, hazardous, or toxic require stricter controls than do those defined as solid waste.

History

Although it has been said that in nature there is no waste, it would appear that waste has always existed in human communities. For many centuries, however, the amount of garbage generated and the dispersal of such materials were not recognized as problems. Like many environmental issues, solid waste became problematic largely due to the increase in the human population on the planet. As people began to live in more densely populated areas, they could no longer ignore the accumulation of solid waste. Evidence indicates that in ancient African cities and the Roman Empire, people disposed of their solid waste on the floors of their dwellings. They lived in the midst of their waste, then built new streets and housing on top of the resultant mess. Eventually, urban dwellers developed a variety of ways of removing their waste products from their living areas: Wastes were gathered in cesspools, directed through drainage systems and sewage systems, redistributed by scavengers, and dumped in designated places outside densely populated areas.

Urbanization and industrialization led to greater accumulations of waste and to collective decisions regarding how to deal with those accumulations. In addition to the problems generated by high concentrations of people on relatively small tracts of land, industrialization led to greater affluence, which correlates positively with the generation of solid waste. Municipal governments began to be expected to develop policies regulating waste disposal and to provide services to assist urban dwellers in dealing with their waste. In England, for example, the Poor Law Commission found in 1842 that a filthy environment promotes the spread of disease. This finding led to an increase in municipal sanitation services.

Sanitation services initially tended to operate on an “out of sight, out of mind” basis and focused on removing solid waste from densely populated areas. Collectors and scavengers gathered some of the waste and put it to other uses. Some waste was burned in incinerators, and some of the steam or electrical energy thus generated was put to use. Most of the solid waste, however, was dumped either into bodies of water or onto land.

Twentieth-century Trends

In 1970, William E. Small brought attention to solid waste as an environmental health problem with his book Third Pollution: The National Problem of Solid Waste Disposal, which discussed the problem of waste as a form of pollution on a par with air and water pollution. It has now become clear, however, that solid waste is a multimedia environmental problem. In one sense, there is no such thing as “disposal” of solid waste. Once solid waste is generated, it must be physically located in at least one of the three key environmental media: land, water, or air. When it is disposed of, solid waste remains in one of those three media. Thus, all solid waste management policies must include guidelines as to how much waste will be allowed to be generated, how much will be redirected toward continued utility, how much will be deposited into water, how much will be emitted into the air, and how much will be deposited on or into the land.

Although developed nations contributed to ongoing efforts to reduce the volume of materials deposited in landfills, land dumping remained the most common answer to the garbage problem through the twentieth century. Approximately 70 percent of the solid waste in economically advanced countries in the twentieth century reached landfills. Even when other solid waste management techniques were utilized, landfilling was often the final answer. By the twenty-first century, 30 to 50 percent continued to reach landfills.

The first landfills were little more than dumping grounds, but approaches to landfilling became more sophisticated over time. During the twentieth century, many town dumps were replaced by municipal sanitary landfills; in some advanced countries, sanitary landfills were replaced by technologically sophisticated and carefully lined regional megalandfills. By the end of the twentieth century, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) predicted the closure of three-fourths of the landfills then in existence. This development was fueled by communities’ resistance to the locating of solid waste management facilities in their vicinity (the “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, syndrome) and by the increasingly stringent technical requirements placed on landfills. Despite the trend toward fewer landfills, the typical size of landfills was much larger, and the technology used to operate them was more complex than that used in the past, resulting in higher costs.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the deposition of solid waste into bodies of water was seen as an effective method of disposal, but it is no longer a popular option. Numerous laws have been enacted to prohibit the dumping of solid waste into the oceans, such as the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act of 1972 (also known as the Ocean Dumping Act), yet illegal dumping continues. Moreover, ocean dumping remains a legal option for many cities and for most commercial vessels. However, even if the practice of dumping solid waste into bodies of water were to stop, the problem of groundwater pollution caused by such dumping would remain.

Incineration, Recycling, and Source Reduction

Incinerating solid waste reduces the volume of material that needs to be landfilled, but the ash it produces must still be landfilled. Incineration also emits air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxins. Incineration has been an institutionalized practice since at least 1865. A small resurgence of incineration technology in the United States during the 1980s quickly subsided due to problems with the technology, economic considerations, and citizen resistance. Incineration is used more widely in Europe and Japan than in the United States.

If waste materials are not to be deposited in water or on land, they must be reused. Resource recovery and recycling are politically popular aspects of solid waste management policy, but their contributions are limited. First, not all solid waste materials appear to have recycling potential. Second, the costs of recovery may be prohibitive. Third, even recovered and recycled products may eventually be deposited in a landfill.

One approach to recycling is converting materials into other products. Cardboard and newspaper are sometimes recycled into other paper products. Aluminum cans may be recycled into other aluminum products or into new aluminum cans. Some plastic products can be recycled into other plastic products—for example, milk cartons into fibers for apparel or foam cups into plastic lawn furniture. Yard waste (grass, leaves, and other organic matter) may be composted, but commercial compost facilities often experience difficulties with odor control. Solid waste may also be seen as an alternative energy source, given that a wide variety of materials may be burned in waste-to-energy facilities to generate steam or electricity; incineration, however, has its own drawbacks, as noted above.

Source reduction is the most fundamental answer to the solid waste problem, but it is also the most difficult to establish as public policy. It stands to reason that reducing the generation of waste will reduce the need to manage it, but the economic impacts of regulating waste generation have thus far prevented waste reduction from becoming a significant part of solid waste management policy. In the United States, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980, also known as Superfund, created a “cradle-to-grave” legal regime that attempts to hold the original generators of hazardous wastes responsible for the costs of managing those wastes, even after they are deposited in legally approved sites.

China's 2018 National Sword policy reshaped the international recycling landscape. Aiming to reduce pollution and improve recycling standards, the policy banned the import of twenty-four types of solid waste material. Prior to this change, China was the leading destination for recyclable waste from Western nations. Some research indicated that this change resulted in a 23 percent increase in landfilled plastics in the US. Additionally, waste-sorting facilities faced higher operating costs and slower processing due to China's stricter contamination standards.

Policy Making

It has been traditional in economically advanced, democratic nations to leave waste management policy-making to local governments. When the problems associated with solid waste were seen as primarily issues of disposal and local health effects, it made sense to leave policy-making at that level, but after solid waste was identified as an environmental problem, policymakers became more inclined to recognize that, like other environmental problems, the impacts often extend beyond local political jurisdictions. Moreover, as the costs of managing solid waste increased, the need for funding assistance from larger units of government increased.

In the United States, for example, the federal government plays a major role in developing modern solid waste management policy. Congress has created legislation, the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies have promulgated regulations, and federal courts have set parameters within which state and local governments must operate. President Lyndon B. Johnson was a leader in bringing the federal government into solid waste policy-making, initiating action that led to the passage of the Solid Waste Disposal Act in 1965, an amendment to the Clean Air Act. In 1976, Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which, in Subtitle D, created the first national waste management program. In combination with other environmental laws, RCRA changed the way solid waste was managed in the United States.

Federal court decisions have further diminished local governments’ control over solid waste management policy-making. In its decision in Philadelphia v. New Jersey (1978), the US Supreme Court said that garbage is to be treated the same as any other commercial commodity under the commerce clause of the US Constitution. This means that state laws and local government ordinances that interfere with interstate commerce in solid waste are unconstitutional. Consequently, state and local governments are not allowed to restrict solid waste that was generated outside their jurisdictions from entering their jurisdictions. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s decision in C. & A. Carbonne, Inc., v. Town of Clarkstown, New York (1994) held that local governments cannot restrict solid waste generated within their jurisdictions from leaving their jurisdictions. Without the ability to control solid waste’s entry into or exit from their jurisdictions, state and local governments are severely restricted in their ability to set solid waste management policy.

Another development in solid waste management policy has been the trend toward privatization. Privatization is not a new approach to solid waste management, but it saw a resurgence in popularity at the end of the twentieth century. Legislative antipathy toward command-and-control regulatory approaches, combined with the legal system’s treatment of solid waste management as a commercial activity rather than a health and welfare issue, strengthened the role of private commercial enterprises in solid waste management.

Bibliography

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"Criteria for the Definition of Solid Waste and Solid and Hazardous Waste Exclusions." Environmental Protection Agency, 8 Sept. 2025, www.epa.gov/hw/criteria-definition-solid-waste-and-solid-and-hazardous-waste-exclusions. Accessed 4 Dec. 2025.

Hickman, H. Lanier, Jr. American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste Management in the United States. Forester Communications, 2003.

Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment. Rev. ed., U of Pittsburgh P, 2005.

"Regulatory and Guidance Information by Topic: Waste." Environmental Protection Agency, 4 Aug. 2025, www.epa.gov/regulatory-information-topic/regulatory-and-guidance-information-topic-waste. Accessed 4 Dec. 2025.

Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New Press, 2005.

"Solid Waste Management Policy 2016-2026." Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 12 Jan. 2023, www.fao.org/faolex/results/details/en/c/LEX-FAOC180227. Accessed 4 Dec. 2025.

Vedantam, Aditya, et al. “Impact of China’s National Sword Policy on the U.S. Landfill and Plastics Recycling Industry.” Sustainability, vol. 14, no. 4, 2022, p. 2456, doi:10.3390/su14042456. Accessed 4 Dec. 2025.