Industrial wastes and public health: Some historical notes, Part 1, 1876-1932

This article has focused on the relatively low priority accorded industrial wastes compared to human wastes by the public health community in the period from 1876 through 1932. The critical reason for this prioritization was the potential for acute health effects from human wastes as compared with the belief that industrial wastes had only indirect effects. State departments of health normally only responded to industrial wastes when they endangered the potable nature of water supplies or interfered with water and sewage treatment processes. Within the public health community, however, a relatively small group of interdiscplinary professionals argued for attention to the indirect health effects of industrial wastes and their impacts on the total stream environment. In conjunction with other groups interested in clean streams - such as sportsmen and manufacturers who required high quality process water - they pushed for a broader state legislative mandate in regard to pollution control. Some states created new bureaus or boards with responsibilioty for industrial wastes and the larger stream environment but the attack on industrial pollution remained limited in this period. The final significant development regarding industrial pollution and public health concerned the formulation by Streeter-Phelps of the Public Health Service of a theory of stream purification with a set of general quantitative indicators. This application was of particular importance in regard to the high-oxygen consuming nature of organic industrial wastes and the wide variety of effluents that existed. Industrial wastes constituted what Harvey Brooks, in his essay 'Science Indicators and Science Priorities' calls a very 'messy' research problem - one that does 'not lend itself to elegant and widely applicable generalizations'. These characteristics tended to retard and complicate research concerning control and reduction and to make their regulation difficult. The Streeter-Phelps model enhanced the possibility of successful control by circumventing the heterogeneous nature of organic industrial effluents. But just as the earlier health-based approach to water pollution had limitations in regard to many other characteristics of stream quality, the focus on DO and BOD was restricted in regard to other features of industrial wastes. These indicator limitations were most obvious in regard to inorganic effluents. They would also become apparent in connection with many of the new chemical compounds that would be produced during and after World War II. The use of any particular set of indicators whether for environmental or social phenomena reflects a definition of the problem that often defines the scope of the attack on that problem. Effective public policy is dependent on accurate indicators and the indicators themselves legitimate the need for policy. The immediate post-war generations would witness an analytical revolution in regard to analyzing and identifying trace elements of various industrial wastes in water supply that made evident the need for new indicators in regard to industrial wastes and led to some of the discoveries and controversies in environmental health today.