And in a creative bid to reduce municipal waste, urban planners have proposed residents separate their garbage and dispose of it into bins connected to giant vacuum tubes that will quickly transfer them to waste treatment plans for recycling.
When Walter Tamosaitis warned in 2011 that the Energy Department's plans for a waste treatment plant at the former Hanford nuclear weapons complex were unsafe, he was demoted and put in a basement room with cardboard boxes and plywood for office furniture.
The Watershed Commission's management plan estimates that many problems in this area – groundwater overexploitation, subsidence, sewage flooding, lack of access and poor quality – could be solved by deepening the lake and building a waste treatment plant nearby.
Also, the system to transport waste from the tanks to a new waste treatment plant may clog and inadequately filter out certain parts of the waste.
Metalclad is a waste-handling company that planned to open a hazardous-waste treatment plant and landfill in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosí in 1995.
The better news: The city has a master plan to improve the piped sewerage service that would cover 65percentt of the future population, while the remaining 35percentt would be served with alternative approaches, including on-site sewerage, conventional septic tanks and community-scale waste-water treatment plans.
A group that backed a waste-treatment plant, one of several in the area, scoffed at the plan, said Paul Lipson, a longtime advocate for the neighborhood and the waterfront.
"Basing waste treatment capacity projections on the projects that are currently in planning is inaccurate because there is a chance that not all the plants will actually be built".
But in a sign of how much improvisation has gone into the plan, company officials said that they would turn a concrete-walled waste treatment building into a large storage tank to hold up to 30,000 tons of contaminated water.
Obtaining planning permission for any development – from housing to wind farms, waste treatment plants or out-of-town supermarkets – is usually difficult and costly, as local authorities have strong powers of veto.
