The Economics of
Regional Pollution Control Systems
ROLF A. DEININGER, Assistant Professor
Department of Environmental Health
School of Public Health
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
INTRODUCTION
It is hardly necessary to point out to this group the increase in pollution control activities in the past few years and the accelerating pace in the construction
of waste treatment facilities. Large amounts of money will have to be spent in
the next few years on pollution control works to keep abreast of the growing population and to take care of the backlog in sewer systems and treatment facilities.
It is only reasonable to expect that these expanded works should provide a maximum of pollution control at a minimum cost.
There is a growing awareness in this country that the problems of pollution
control may behest accomplished on a regional basis. This thinking has been
nurtured and supported to a great extent by the writings of Allen Kneese (1,2).
The economics of scale in waste collection and waste treatment are well known
and suggest that in many cases combined action is more economical. This very
fact has caused the creation of many sanitary districts and county sewage authorities. There seems to be no reason why the same concept could not be applied to
an entire watershed. As a matter of fact, there is one outstanding example of
such an organization, the "Emscher Genossenschaft" in the Ruhr District of West
Germany. This organization has the very broad powers to plan, design, construct
and operate all necessary treatment works for the abatement of pollution in the
Emscher River Basin.
The only comparable counterpart of this organization in the United States is
the Delaware River Basin Commission which has similar general powers. Whether
it is a county authority or a river basin organization, both have the same desire to
maintain a certain water quality at minimum costs.
Only recently there have been significant developments in the area of operations research and systems analysis. Very powerful, new computational techniques
known under the names of linear programming, dynamic and non-linear programming have emerged which permit the optimization of rather complex physical
systems. Probably none of these techniques would play the important role they do
now were it not for the concurrent development of high speed electronic computers.
This paper is concerned with applying tnis new technology and methodology
to regional pollution control systems. Investigations were concentrated on two
main problems. The first one is the problem of how the treatment at various
plants should be established to minimize the total costs of waste treatment over
the entire region or basin. This cost is compared with two other schemes of pollution control -- one where every city has the same degree of treatment and the
other where the upstream polluters are allowed to discharge as much waste as possible without violating water quality criteria set along the river.
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