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Both Sides Now...

reprinted from an article in Ramparts (May 1970).

In January of this year Coca-Cola Company announced its purchase of water treatment equipment and desalination systems. "The acquisition will permit Coca-Cola to enter the mainstream of environmental control systems," declared a spokesman for the company. Perhaps the people at Coke have seen the handwriting on the wall and realize that their livelihood depends on having clean water to make brown. But whatever the precise reasoning, the marriage of Coke and Aqua-Chem is just one among a rash of similar developments on Wall Street where pollution control has emerged as one of the hottest growth industries of the '70's. AS Forbes Magazine put it in a recent cover story, there's "cash in all that trash."

Since the beginning of December 1969, despite a market engaged in a remarkably stubborn downward spiral, stock issues of companies with substantial interests in pollution control have made price advances of often better than 50 per cent. For the pollution control industry as a whole, the average annual growth rate for the next five years is expected to climb to better than 20 per cent, which is almost three times that of most manufacturing groups.

Lester Krellenstein, an engineer and pollution control promoter for the brokerage firm of H. Hentz and Company, believes that President Nixon's appointment of a Council of Environmental Quality triggered the heavy buying. Present estimates of the potential market start at $25 billion.

But of all the developments in the fledgling industry, by far the most instructive is the corporate integration of polluters and controllers. About two dozen pollution control companies are subsidiaries or divisions of the largest corporations and polluters in the United States. Represented among this latter group are Dow Chemical Co., Monsanto Chemical, W.R. Grace, DuPont. Merck, Nalco, Union Carbide, General Electric, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, Honeywell, Beckman Instruments Alcoa, Universal Oil Products, North American Rockwell, and many others Although these super-corporations current make less in sales from pollution control than do smaller firms like Research-Cottrell and Wheelabrator, their superior access to capital, resources, markets, management skills and political power will invariably be translated into a superior competitive position as ecologymovement flowers and the control industry grows.

The pollution control industry is really an extension of both the technological capabilities and the marketing patterns of the capital goods sector of the economy. Most of the companies involved in pollution control are not only polluters themselves but are the same firms which supply the chemicals, machines, plant fuels and parts for even bigger polluters, such as General Motors, U.S. Steel, Boeing, Standard Oil, Philco-Ford, American Can Co. and Consolidated Edison. For many of these firms, pollution control is merely one aspect of a program of "environmental diversification," which is generally accompanied by heavy investment and aggressive acquisition programs.

Koppers, for instance, is an engineering and construction firm that designs municipal sewage plants as well as air and water purification systems. Among its many specialties in pollution abatement is the production of gas removal devices for electric utilities., steel plants, coke plants and foundries. At the same time, however, Koppers is one of the world's leading builders of steelmaking equipment and is responsible for designing over 25 per cent of all basic steelmaking facilities in the U.S., as well as half of the present domestic coke plants in operation. Thus it gets the business coming and going. Since 80 per cent of the coke plants in the nation will require modernization in the '70's, and the steel industry expects to increase its overall capacity by 50 per cent, Koppers can expect good profits designing the pollution control systems needed to curb the pollution caused by all the new coke ovens, steel furnaces and foundries which it will construct.

It is the chemical industry, however, that best illustrates the consequences of the incest between the pollution control business and the industrial polluters. First, the chemical industry is in the enviable position of reaping sizable profits by attempting to clean up rivers and lakes (at public expense) which they have profitably polluted in the first place. To facilitate this, practically every major chemical company in the U.S. has established a pollution abatement division or is in the process of doing so. Dow Chemical, for example, produces a wide variety of products and services for water pollution abatement, including measuring instruments, specialty treatment chemicals, and a special biological filter medium called Surf-Pac. The company designs, engineers, builds and services waste water treatment plants and is currently supervising municipal sewage plants in Cleveland and working on waste disposal problems for lumber companies in Pensacola, Florida, and West Nyack, New York. All of these projects are funded by the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration (FWPCA).

Thus, the chemical industry—which ranks second in production of polluted waste water and generates close to 50 per cent of the biological oxygen demand in industrial water before treatment—has, at the same time, established a dominant position in the water pollution control business.

A second consequence of placing the "control" of pollution in the hands of big business is that the official abatement levels will inevitably be set low enough to protect industry's power to pollute and therefore its ability to keep costs down and revenues high. According to a recent study by the FWPCA, if the chemical industry were to reduce its pollution of water to zero, the costs involved would amount to almost $2.7 billion per year. This would cut profits almost by half.

Fortunately for the chemical industry, the present abatement target is only 75 per cent reduction in water pollution through "secondary treatment" methods which will clean up the solids but leave the phosphates, nitrogen compounds and a host of other poisonous substances which secondary treatment can't possibly catch.

Of course, it is precisely the profit incentive as the criterion of what shall and shall not be produced that makes it impossible to stop the proliferation and profusion of poisons in even the most obvious places. Thus, the chemical industry has polluted the housewife's food package not only through the unintended absorption pesticide residues, but also through innumerable colorings, additives (like the cyclamates) and preservatives designed to increase food purchases and consumption, in order to buoy up sagging sales curves. The package itself, which is a sales boosting device par excellence, can be both the most polluting and dangerous feature of all. As a piece de resistance the chemical industry produces the non-biodegradable plastic container, which comes in all sizes, shapes and colors, and, if made from polyvinyl plastic, can be deadly in the most literal sense of the word. When Dow's Saran-Wrap is accumulated as trash and burned, it produces phosgene gas-a poison gas used in World War 1 and currently stockpiled by the Department of Defense. Exposure for only a short duration to 50 parts of phosgene per million parts of air will cause death. The chemical industry currently makes approximately five billion pounds of polyvinyl plastic per year and output i expected to rise by seven per cent this year alone.

Another consequence of business control of cleaning up the environment is cost to the public. Most municipal water treatment plants in large urban areas are currently constructed to handle an excess capacity frequently 100 per cent greater than the volume of waste actually produced by their resident populations. Much of this surplus capacity is used by big business (especially the chemical industry) to dispose of its wastes. Although industries are charged for this use, it is the consumers and taxpayers, through federal grants and state bonds, who bear the cost of construction and maintenance of the treatment facilities. Thus the public pays the polluters to construct the treatment facilities necessitated by the polluters in the first place.

Thus pollution control, developed as a complementary industry, is a way to insure that the favorable balance between cost, sales and profits can be maintained and business can continue as usual—indeed, better than usual, for pollution control means new investment outlets, new income and new profits; the more waste, the better. Pollution control as conceived by the pollution control industry is merely an extension of the same pattern of profit-seeking exploitation and market economics which is at the root of the environmental crisis itself.

The most salient fact about the crisis that now threatens to overwhelm us is that it is first and fore-most a product of the so-called free-enterprise system. It is not technology per se, but the way technology is employed (its organization and channeling) that creates the problems. Take, for example, the automobile. What logic determined man's use, as his central mode of transportation, of a device which threw concrete highways across the plains, cut up the forests, poisoned the atmosphere, congested the cities and created the sprawling conurbations that have smothered the land? Was it safe? Computed as fatalities per mile, the death rate for cars is 25 times that for trains and 10 times that for planes. Was it efficient? A traffic study made in 1907 shows that horse-drawn vehicles in New York moved at an average speed of 11.5 miles per hour. Today, automobiles crawl at the average daytime rate of six miles per hour.

The costs of pollution are borne by our lungs and in individual cleaning bills; the costs of lack of safety are paid in individual hospital bills and individual deaths. Suppose Ford had been forced from the outset to reckon the social costs (at least the ones that could be quantified) and to put that in the price of his autos. At that price, people would have bought trains as their mass transportation, or more reasonably, they would have been forced to structure their cities and communities in a way which would have enabled them to walk to virtually all of the places necessary.

The problems created by the market system are thus like original sin: their implications keep spreading and diversifying. Now, when the demand for cars shows signs of being saturated, the market strategists get to work and-by changing models, manipulating consumers and planning the obsolescence of their product—generate the need for more and more cars, ad infinitum. The waste in resources is staggering (it has been estimated that style changes in autos alone cost $4 billion annually) and the increase in pollution incalcuable.

The pollution control industry itself reflects this irrationality in production for profit. It, too, is a growth industry. It, too, depends for its existence on society's capacity to make waste. The production of steel, copper, aluminum, asbestos and beryllium components for air pollution systems and sewage plants will probably create more air pollution and kill more rivers. The waste involved in the production of all the specialty chemicals and biological agents needed for water treatment alone is staggering. Moreover, the waste in resources required to not reduce the despoliation of the environment.

Instead of reorganizing the productive system for social ends, thereby eliminating the problem of waste production and distribution at its source, pollution control under business auspices amounts to no more than rationalizing and improving waste production by making it less ugly, less harmful, less objectionable, and more pleasant for everybody. The object of this king of pollution control is to make pollution "functional" in society, to institionalize it, to change it into a necessary and regular part of the everyday world. There is no more effective way to do that than to make it possible for a whole industry to make money out of it. To the military-industrial complex, with a we can now add an eco-pollution-industrial complex, with a vested interest in continuing economic growth and environmental malaise.

Following every failure of the business system in a major social area, the government has stepped in to create a new social-industrial complex, passing the costs of rehabilitation and correction on to the tax-paying public, and reserving the benefits for the corporations, Like the defense suppliers and the educational-manpower conglomerates, the pollution control industry now enjoys the good fortune of being legislated into success. Lavish profits will come from ready-made markets bolstered by special laws controlling pollution levels of factories, special tax write-offs for the industrial buyers of abatement equipment, and plenty of Research and Development money for the pollution controllers themselves. As government outlays on abatement grow, will the profits accruing to the pollution control industry. With Uncle Sam posing as Mr. Clean, the crisis of the environment can't help being profitable.

The crisis of the environment must be viewed in terms of a paradox central to modern society. The mobilization of the productive energies of society and the physical forces of nature for the purpose of accumulating profits or enhancing private power and privilee now conflicts directly with the universal dependence of men upon nature for the means of their common survival. A society whose principal ends and incentives are monetary and expansionist inevitably produces material and cultural impoverishment-in part precisely because of the abundance of profitable goods. To make an industry out of cleaning up the mess that industry itself makes is a logical extension of corporate capitalism. What is needed, however, is not an extension of what is already bad, but its transformation into something better.