Earlier this year Resources for the Future conducted a series of lectures dealing with ways in which other countries are meeting their natural resource problems and with lessons the United States might learn from them. (The collected papers will be published for RFF in December by The Johns Hopkins Press under the title of Comparisons in Resource Management.) "Pollution Abatement in the Ruhr" was one of the subjects. The remarks of Gordon M. Fair, Professor of Sanitary Engineering at Harvard, Abel Wolman, Professor of Sanitary Engineering at Johns Hopkins, and Edward J. Cleary, Executive Director and Chief Engineer of the Ohio Valley Water Sanitation Commission, are condensed here as they relate to an important aspect of water treatment—its financing.
"The visitor to the great industrial complex of the Ruhr, in West Germany," said Mr. Fair, "will be struck today by the absence of unsightly waste or neglected land and swamps, and the neatness of the contained water courses.
“This was not always so ... " As far back as the 1600s and until the turn of the present century, the condition of the Emscher River was the subject of complaints; also the river was feared for its floods. "Coal mines were sunk into the Emscher Valley in the 1860s. Here and there, the ground caved in above their workings. The resulting surface depressions had no outlets ... Marshes formed. The flotsam and jetsam of household and industry rotted in the shallows. At the same time, the waste waters of the growing communities and industries polluted the river and its tributaries.
Around 1899 responsible citizens concluded that public authorities must proceed in common with mines and other industry to devise an effective master plan for the drainage basin as a whole. In 1904 the Emschergenossenschaft or Emscher Association was created by legislation.
Between 1904 and 1930 five other similar river basin associations in the Ruhr District were legally constituted. Each Association was empowered to invest, plan, design, construct, operate, maintain, repair, and replace necessary installations or engineering works for the abatement of pollution in a given river basin and for the general management of its waters; furthermore, each Association was to accomplish its task in cooperation with all public and private corporations or persons that were themselves polluters or drew benefits from posed improvements; and, last but not least, necessary financing to take the form of (1) public loans for capital improvements and (2) internal allocation of running expenses to the members of each association insofar as expenses were not covered by income.
Membership of each Association consists of industrial enterprises, whether mines, waterworks, hydroelectric plants, or other; and of the district's public administrative components. In some instances, other public or private bodies also are members. “In financing the Associations' work, the guiding principle is that the cost of pollution abatement, and the value of direct, as well as indirect, benefits derived by a member from the execution, maintenance, and operation of the different installations of the Association are assessable. In the Emschergenossenschaft, enterprises other than mining are obligated only if their contributions equal or exceed 0.5 percent of the annual budget. If they do not, the member district in which a given enterprise is situated is assessed. Association assessment then gives way to taxation.
These expenditures of the river basin associations are sizable; cumulated total capital improvements in 1954 have been placed at $125 million, and in 1955 at $150 million. Apart from recent government payments for the repair of war-damaged structures and for the provision of flood storage space in impounding reservoirs, the funds are raised entirely by the Associations themselves. The total amount spent by the six river Associations during the year 1959 exceeded $54 million, almost equally divided between running expenses and capital improvements.
Charges made upon an industry or municipality for industrial waste treatment are a substantial source of income. As an example of problems of equity that arise in determining such charges, Mr. Cleary took the hypothetical case of two Phenol-producing plants, one of which produces 1,000 pounds of Phenol, the other 100 pounds. The stream they both use can assimilate only 1,000 pounds of the 1,100-pound total. The Association decides which plant will have the treatment facilities; usually the reduction would take place at the larger one. But the plant that has the smaller phenol discharge and treats no waste would bear its proportional share of the cost.
The same situation holds for sewage treatment: No community wants to build a treatment plant if the benefits, but not the cost, are shared by others. The Genossenschaft therefore determines where treatment plants should be and then proceeds to build them, distributing the costs equitably among the beneficiaries.
In the United States stream pollution is not yet at the critical stage that provoked action in the Ruhr District. But with growing urbanization and industrialization since the turn of the century, outlays for pollution abatement—primarily to protect people against disease—have been large.
"For 1954," Mr. Wolman said, 'the Public Health Service estimated that residual sewage loads, reaching streams from municipal and industrial sources had an oxygen requirement equivalent to 150 million people. The Service estimates the anticipated requirements for 1980 to be equivalent to 174 million people, dropping to 168 million in 2000 assuming increases in treatment facilities. To meet these loads, some have estimated that $1 billion annually will be required."
Waterborne enteric disease now is rare, he pointed out. "It is yet to be demonstrated whether the viruses offer a new but similar threat. The potential hazards of long-term repetitive ingestion of small amounts of exotic chemicals likewise are still to be evaluated.
"The main interest in our society today is with protection of the waters for recreation, wildlife, and aesthetic values. Here the man in the street, uncluttered by scientific doubts and delayed research, clamors for visible cleanliness rather than invisible risk. This shift in public perspective may provide the energetic drive to speed up correction. It remains to be seen how effective this enthusiasm is when dollar cost confronts the citizen."
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1961 issue of Resources magazine.
