The Garbage God

Set in the arid plains of western Texas, the small city of Odessa (pop. 79,000) was built for one reason: exploitation of the immense oil deposits that lie around it. But today's riches disguise tomorrow's problem. The oil reserves will run out in 15 to 20 years--and then what? The town has no other industry, and the surrounding land is too poor to support large-scale cattle ranching, much less farming.

Yet Odessa need not become a ghost town. At least that is what Dr. Geoffrey Stanford says. A blithe, British-born M.D. who conducts research and teaches at the University of Texas School of Public Health, he insists that Odessa can build a new prosperity on an unlikely foundation--its own wastes.

The key to Stanford's plan is the cellulose in wastepaper and grass clippings. Although cellulose is indigestible for man, it is the basic diet of microorganisms that can trigger a natural sequence of soil enrichment. Stanford proposes to plow cellulose-containing material in garbage into the desert soil. Next, he would fertilize it with "sludge," a purified end product of sewage treatment that looks like gruel, smells like tar and is loaded with nutrients. Using a little sewage water for irrigation, Stanford says, will then turn the desert into a vast garden. His theory makes eminent sense to scientists--and to Odessans, who believe him even when he rhapsodizes about Sunday strolls through the city's future "forests."

The Odessa project will start next fall. Every day, 250 tons of garbage, 20 cu. yds. of sludge, and up to 500,000 gal. of sewage water will be sent to a 640-acre plot that one rancher has donated to the experiment. Other landowners are anxious to follow suit. Indeed, says Jack Dillard, director of Odessa's utilities department, "we may have some fights over people wanting to have city garbage dumped on their land--a new kind of range war."

The problem of processing the garbage before it is plowed under will be handled by Alton Newell, a millionaire manufacturer of auto-shredding machines in San Antonio. Seeking to diversify his company, he is building a special, highly automated garbage-handling machine for Odessa. It will sort out the wastes and crush them into small pellets. Old paper and other leftovers will go to Dr. Stanford's project. Newell will sell the metal wastes to recyclers until he recoups the $600,000 construction cost of the machine, which he will then turn over to Odessa for $1. Meanwhile, the city will save about $60,000 a year by feeding garbage to the machine instead of trucking it to man-made holes in the desert.

By 1979, Dr. Stanford believes, Odessa should be well on its way to becoming an agricultural center. To be sure, some important points must first be resolved. He has not yet decided, for example, exactly which crops should be planted. He must also confront a Texas law banning the sale of food grown in human wastes, even though the sludge contains neither pathogens nor "any element of sham or sin." To prove the point, he will reserve 16 acres for scientific tests of all trace elements in various crops.

Odessans call Dr. Stanford "the God of Garbage." He does not quarrel with the title. Sipping wine in his Houston home, he talks of using wastes to transform wastelands everywhere. The day will come, he confidently predicts, when London will fly its garbage to Saudi Arabia in trade for oil and gas.

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