Professors Draft Boston Trash Plan

Two professors at the Graduate School of Public Health have figured out what Boston can do with its trash. They suggest burning it in a converted World War II freighter and dumping the ashes at sea.

Leslie Silverman, professor of Engineering in Environmental Hygiene, and Melvin W. First, associate professor of Applied Industrial Hygiene, have asked Washington for $350,000 to put their ideas into practice. They expect the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency to grant the funds before January, and a pilot incinerator vessel to be in operation by 1965.

The craft, Silverman said yesterday, will probably be a surplus Liberty or Victory ship, which Congress can make available for it. He estimated it would cost $1,250,000 to make the necessary modifications, compared to the $2 1/2 - $3 million it would cost to build a land incinerator.

Once in operation, the ship could handle approximately 1000 tons of trash a day from Boston and Quincy, burning it beyond the three-mile limit and leaving the ashes about 20 miles from shore. It might, if successful, form the nucleus of a fleet handling all 4000 tons of refuse generated daily in the Greater Boston area.

The ship might also point the way to the solution of a growing national problem, since 70 per cent of the major urban communities in the United States border the ocean or the Great Lakes. According to Silverman, the per capita production of garbage has risen in recent years from two or four pounds a day, while it has become increasingly difficult to find suitable locations for incinerators and dumps.

The $350,000 grant from the FHHFA would go first to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and then to the Metropolitan District Commission, which has shown interest in extending its operations to trash collection. Individual communities now handle collections, usually on a mixed public-private basis.

The MDC would keep $200,000 for engineering studies and funnel the remaining $150,000 to the School of Public Health, where it would be used for research into the ultimate oceanographic effects of the incinerator and the development of an adequate land-transport system.