THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 11, 1994 TAG: 9410110312
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF AND WIRE REPORT
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
After $80 million and more than a decade of research, the Navy is still years away from solving a nagging problem: how to take out the trash at sea.
A draft report by the General Accounting Office recounts what it says is a spotty Navy record in complying with a 1973 treaty that requires ships to stop dumping trash overboard.
The treaty terms exempt warships but Congress in 1987 ordered the Navy to comply anyway. The law sets the year 2000 as a deadline for surface ships and 2008 as the cutoff for submarines to meet the treaty's standards.
A Navy official vigorously disputed the report, saying commercial shippers and other nations recognize the Navy is a leader in developing technologies needed to cope with trash at sea. ``To suffer a report that leaves out all the good news is really disturbing,'' the official said.
According to the GAO, an investigative arm of Congress, the Navy assumed that because its mission requires lengthy deployments between ports of call, it had little to learn from commercial shippers. In addition, the Navy concluded early that it would need until nearly the turn of the century to develop adequate technology.
``These factors have contributed to the current situation, whereby most of the Navy's equipment development projects, costing about $80 million through the fiscal year 1994, have been canceled or reduced,'' the GAO reported. The Navy failed to propose interim milestones for solving the trash problem, according to the GAO.
No one disputes that the Navy has a serious trash problem. A typical aircraft carrier, for example, generates more than nine tons of trash per day. Carriers often patrol for months in strategic locations such as the Persian Gulf.
Several attempted solutions yielded mixed results. In the 1970s the Navy worked on a trash compactor designed to mash trash into a sinkable slug. The only problem was that sometimes the slug didn't sink, leaving behind a dense, bobbing mass of trash as a hazard to navigation.
Research into a plastic melting device and trash shredders yielded better results. Navy officials working on the program have a bench in their Pentagon office made out of a hardened disk of melted plastic trash. The Navy also is researching more exotic forms of trash elimination such as plasma arc technology and ``ram jet'' incineration.
All these efforts were set in motion by a treaty reached by the United States and other maritime nations on preventing pollution from ships. Federal legislation implementing the pact prohibits dumping plastic-based trash anywhere at sea and imposes tighter restrictions in selected sensitive areas such as the Antarctic.
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY OCEAN DUMPING
by CNB