A Fortune Proposition:

Polluted air is corroding metals, menacing health, and degrading the human spirit. For around $3 billion a year, equitably shared, we can erase the outrage.

An astounding 133 million tons of aerial garbage is now being dumped into the U.S. atmosphere each year. If it could be placed on a giant scale, it would outweigh the country's annual steel production. The charts on the opposite page, based on estimates by the U.S. Public Health Service, show which human activities are responsible for this rising torrent of contamination, and what each activity's ugly brew consists of. The charts show only the five pollutants that account for most of the over-all tonnage; not shown are scores of other gases and stinks that defile the nation's air.

These pollutants are eating away at fabrics and metals. They are defacing buildings and spoiling crops. The government estimates the property damage alone at $11 billion a year, and this does not include the decline in real-estate values in neighborhoods with air that is second class or worse. Air pollution also represents a prodigious waste of potentially valuable resources: the harmful sulfur dioxide that is vented to the atmosphere each year, for example, contains about $300 million worth of sulfur at today's prices. While medical researchers have not proved that any of these pollutants is injuring large numbers of people, this junk obviously is doing our systems no good. "There is no longer any doubt," Surgeon General Luther L. Terry declared nearly three years ago, "that air pollution is a hazard to health." In agreement, the American Medical Association recently called for "maximum feasible reduction of all forms of air pollution."

Besides damaging health and property and wasting resources, air pollution dejects and degrades the human spirit in ways that a civilized society should not tolerate. The acrid smog associated with automobile exhausts, once confined to Los Angeles but now turning up elsewhere, probably does not kill people. It merely envelops them in an ugly yellow haze that blots out the view and smarts the eyes. The pride of Denver-the prospect of the Rocky Mountains from downtown streets-is often obscured these days by a man-made cloud of pollution. New Yorkers,

plagued with 12,000 soot-spewing apartment-house incinerators, literally inhale a portion of their own garbage. In St. Louis, a survey showed, 39 percent of the people are dogged by noisome odors. After poor schools and inadequate play space, air pollution is probably the most important single factor driving the middle class to the suburbs, and a portion of the country's commuting woes must be ascribed to it. Renascent cities are trying to lure these citizens back, but they recoil from air that is dirty, malodorous, and menacing.

The U.S. has both the technology and the wealth to reduce pollution drastically. Even though thousands of factories are still discharging their wastes into the public air, most of the devices for controlling emissions from industrial plants were invented years ago. "We can handle just about any pollution-control demand that is likely to be made," says John E. Schork, president of Research-Cottrell, Inc., a leading maker of pollution-abating devices. Cleaning up automobile emissions and the sulfur dioxide from electric power stations still presents engineering problems, but solutions will undoubtedly be found in the next few years.

Money is not a problem, either. The nationwide application of the best techniques either already or soon to be available would cost the country far less than is generally believed. An expenditure of less than one-half of 1 percent of the gross national product-probably about $3 billion a year-would reduce air pollution by at least two-thirds. By drastically reducing that $11 billion a year of property damage, the expenditure would easily pay for itself.

With the technical skills and the monetary means at hand, it is incredible that we put up with this needless outrage. With an awakened public, there would be no need to employ susbsidies and other economic gimmicks to hasten industry's cleanup, as some experts have proposed. Corporations can absorb many of these expenditures anyway, and consumers would not notice them in the prices of the things they buy. Indeed, households would probably feel the costs of a national rollback of air pollution only in the prices of two items, electricity and new cars. But these two items are so universal that price increases, rather than subsidies, would be a perfectly equitable way to distribute the burden. The role of the federal government, FORTUNE believes, can largely be confined to the setting of standards, and to aiding state and local governments in enforcement.

What's done is too little

A good deal is already being done about air pollution, to be sure. Thanks to the Clean Air Act of 1963, which for the first time made matching federal grants available for state and local enforcement efforts, dozens of localities have set up control programs. While many companies have waited until local authori' forced them to clean up, some enlightened manageme ave designed new factories

more tightly controlled an local regulations require. Exact figures are not available, but industry is probably spending about $300 million a year on the installation and operation of special equipment, changes in materials and production processes, and on research designed to abate air pollution. Spending by government at all levels on enforcement and research now is running at $35 million annually, about three-fifths of it federal money. The national effort may grow larger now that Congress has passed a bill by Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine that, among other things, enables the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to order the nationwide installation on new cars of devices to limit the pollution from tail pipes.

But all the present efforts, even combined with those under serious consideration, may not permit us to hold our own. During the next forty years the population of the country's urban areas is expected to double, and industrial output and automobile ownership in these same urban zones will grow even faster. The emissions from each factory chimney, automobile tail pipe, and other sources will have to be reduced more than 50 percent on the average, just to keep the urban air from becoming any fouler than it already is. If the air is to be improved, the clampdown on emissions will obviously have to be even tighter.

In the case of "stationary" sources of air pollution like factories, incinerators, and electric power stations, the present effort is far too small to bring about any significant advances. The only pollutants of this kind that have been reduced noticeably are the nongaseous, largely nontoxic dusts and fumes that come under the general heading of "particulate matter." Chicago's "dust fall" has declined since the 1930's, and Pittsburgh and St. Louis no longer experience darkness at noon. But this improvement was helped along by the switch from coal for heating, and the switching is nearly complete. As the rainfall of dust and soot on Manhattan's East Side (eighty tons a month per square mile) testifies, particulate matter is still an abominable nuisance in many areas. In fast-industrializing cities like Denver, it is on the increase.

Meanwhile, emissions of the far more dangerous gaseous pollutants are rising dramatically. If recent trends continue, the emission of sulfur dioxide from electric power stations the largest single source-will increase sixfold by the year 2000. The control devices recently developed for autos, even if adopted across the nation, will bring no lasting rollback in carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions, since these gains will be more than canceled out by rising automobile registrations, which are doubling every twenty-five years.

In the longer-range future, the increase in the airborne wastes thrown off by man's activities may require some drastic solutions. The tremendous rise in the worldwide use of fossil fuels, some authorities say, is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than plants and the

ocean can absorb it. This gas, which is the unavoidable result of all combustion, is not a "pollutant" in the ordinary sense of being harmful or annoying. But carbon dioxide produces a "greenhouse effect," and tends to block the radiation back to outer space of some of the heat energy that the earth absorbs from the sun. The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased about 8 percent since 1890, and may account for the slight warming up of the Northern Hemisphere since then. In a study two years ago, the Conservation Foundation found this carbon dioxide buildup "not yet alarming," but said it might eventually cause the polar ice caps to melt, submerging many of the world's cities. To this kind of threat, the only answer might be a large-scale switchover to nuclear power, which produces no carbon dioxide.

The dump has its limits

While the carbon dioxide buildup will bear close watching in the years ahead, the immediate task is to cleanse the air of those 133 million tons of dirt and poison that are annually pouring into it. The atmosphere's limitations as a dumping ground for this kind of junk have already become obvious. There are 90 trillion tons of air over the forty-eight contiguous states at any given time. Last year's load of pollutants, if released in an instant and evenly dispersed, would amount to only 1.5 parts per million in the air. Since the contamination actually is spread over a year and continually falls to the ground or is washed out by rains, the average concentration in the nation's total air supply is considerably less than that. But half of this pollution is emitted from less than 1 percent of the U.S. land area, where 50 percent of the population lives. When winds are slack, this far heavier outpouring can build up to thousands of times the national average.

Things can get even worse when there is also a temperature inversion, in which a warm layer of air aloft acts as a lid atop the contaminants in the cooler surface air. This phenomenon was once thought to be peculiar to Los Angeles, where the lid drops to 500 feet or less 40 percent of the time. Actually, it occurs commonly throughout most of the U.S. In New York and Philadelphia, for example, low-level inversions occur 25 percent of the time, and even more often in the fall. The only real difference is that Los Angeles' inversions tend to be lower, and are accompanied by below-average winds. But New York throws off much more non-automotive air pollution. The air above us is not a boundless ocean. Much of the time it is a shallow, stagnant pond, and we are the fish at the bottom.

In Los Angeles, compulsion brings results

The most rigid emission standards in the U.S. today are applied in the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District. Faced with acute smog conditions, Los Angeles authorities have forced the installation of pollution-limiting devices on California automobiles. They have also forced industry to reduce its emissions by nearly 80 percent since the late 1940's; an estimated 5,000 tons of pollutants a day from stationary sources are now being kept out of the sky. What would be the cost of a "Los Angeles treatment" for all manufacturing? We can get some indication by looking at a few of the major air polluters, such as steel and chemical plants and oil refineries.

The orange clouds of dust-mainly iron oxide-pouring out of smokestacks carry the major pollutants that the steel industry generates. Not long ago steel companies in Chicago, with a combined ingot capacity of about 13 million tons a year, agreed to eliminate all dust by 1971 at a reported capital cost of approximately $30 million. This suggests a cost of about $2.50 per ton of capacity. Since steel companies in several other cities are pushing ahead with controls or replacing open hearths with basic oxygen furnaces-all of which have controls-it appears that as much as two-thirds of the country's approximately 150 million tons of steelmaking capacity may be operating with "clean stacks" by the early 1970's. Generously assuming that it might cost as much as $5 per ton of capacity to equip the remaining third, or about $250 million, the industry would have approximately to double its spending on air-pollution equipment in the years ahead.

The chemical industry, turning out thousands of different products, emits a bewildering variety of gases and exotic odors. Lots of chemical plants, as one industry spokesman concedes, are "quite flavorsome" to human noses, which have a remarkable sensitivity to noisome odors. A lot of the effluent is potentially dangerous, too. The phosphate fertilizer plants in Polk and Hillsborough counties in Florida used to emit large quantities of fluorid.s that damaged citrus crops and caused the teeth of cattle to drop out. But in the last five years the plants have installed about $22 million worth of equipment and cut emissions by more than half, while increasing production 43 percent. One of them, faced with a shutdown by a court injunction, managed to reduce its daily fluoride emissions from 900 to 300 pounds in only sixty days. The members of the Manufacturing Chemists Association, which embraces most of the industry, have invested a total of $212 million in air-pollution control facilities to date, and expect to spend another $49 million in the next five years. This does not include additional operating costs or research, which together come to $26,600,000 a year. Rough estimates of what it would cost to bring all the country's chemical plants up to the level of the cleanest ones range up to $500 million just for equipment, not counting outlays already planned, but half that amount might do the job.

The cleanest petroleum refineries in the nation are to be found, not surprisingly, in the Los Angeles area. Standard Oil of California's refinery at El Segundo, partly screened by trees, emits little besides innocuous steam to the atmosphere and cannot be smelled more than half a block away. To comply with Los Angeles' strict rules, oilmen say, would probably add between 5 and 10 percent to the cost of a new refinery. While no recent figures are available, a 1961 survey showed that U.S. petroleum refineries were spending about $18 million a year on pollutionabatement equipment. But 44 percent of the money was being spent on the West Coast. Bringing all U.S. refineries up to Los Angeles standards, therefore, might require the expenditure of an additional $10 million a year on equipment. Some of this would pay for itself by recovering valuable substances. Indeed, it has been estimated that four-fifths of the sulfur dioxide which U.S. petroleum refineries might otherwise be venting to the atmosphere is now captured as sulfuric acid or elemental sulfur.

The particulars on particulate matter

The troublesome pollutants from electric power stations are particulate matter, in the form of fly ash, and sulfur dioxide. The first comes almost entirely from coal-burning generating plants, and the techniques for controlling it have been around for decades. In 1962, according to the Edison Electric Institute, private power companies kept nine million tons of fly ash from entering the sky, far more than the approximately two million tons that escaped. Electrostatic precipitators in the newest plants catch 99 percent of the stuff, and a still newer unit at a mine-mouth plant going up in western Pennsylvania will be the first in the U.S. to remove 99.5 percent. Unfortunately, new plants are still being built in some areas with mechanical collection systems that keep no more than 70 percent out of the air. To bring all the country's 130 million kilowatts of coal-burning generating capacity up to the 99.5 percent level might cost about $300 million.

The cost of collecting fly ash has only a negligible effect on the price of electricity-well under 1 percent by one estimate, counting the write-off of equipment. The control of sulfur dioxide, on the other hand, could have a sizable effect on consumers' monthly bills. Electric generating stations are the country's biggest single source of this gas, and capturing it before it goes out the stack is one of the really tough problems in cleaning up the air. Most of the gas comes from the burning of coal, which contains about 2.5 percent sulfur on the average, and which is used to generate 54 percent of the nation's electricity. Oil accounts for a much smaller share, but heavy residual fuel oil, which generally has about the same percentage of sulfur, is used extensively in places like New York City.

Sulfur dioxide is the most worrisome of the major pollutants, and 23 million tons of it are currently being discharged into the country's air. It has been implicated in most of the famous air-pollution disasters, such as the 1948 one at Donora, Pennsylvania (twenty dead), and the 400 "excess deaths" recorded during a fifteen-day smog episode in New York City early in 1963. While not toxic to man in the concentrations ordinarily found in the atmosphere, it can cause acute crop damage in relatively small concentrations. In industrial regions it causes nickel to corrode twenty-five times as fast as in rural air, and copper five times as fast. And under certain conditions it kills people. One of its derivatives, sulfuric acid mist, can get past the body's natural filtration system and penetrate deep into the lungs, causing severe damage. While the sulfur dioxide in New York City, which has the highest concentration, averages only 0.16 parts per million, it has flared up as high as 2.64 p.p.m.-enough to kill some persons already suffering from respiratory ailments.

Until now, no economically feasible way has been found to curb the emissions of this gas from coal- and oil-burning power stations. The only solution has been for the electric companies to build tall stacks so that the sulfur dioxide will not reach the ground until it is far away and greatly diluted. But electric-power consumption in the U.S. is doubling every twelve years, and the consumption of coal by utilities is expected to rise almost as rapidly in the years ahead. Some air-pollution men already question the efficacy of building ever higher stacks in the nation's fast

spreading metropolitan complexes. Nor will atomic power or natural gas-which contains very little sulfur--be of much help in the years just ahead.

There appear to be only two ways out. In the case of residual fuel oil, local authorities could require power companies to switch to No. 2 oil, which is low in sulfur but costs 80 percent more. Or petroleum companies could take part of the sulfur out of residual oil, raising its price 20 to 30 percent. As for coal, the only answer is to trap the sulfur dioxide after the fuel is burned, and to convert it to marketable acid or elemental sulfur. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is planning to spend $7 million to build pilot models of some systems that show promise of being able to make such a conversion economically. Recently, officials of the Bureau of Mines estimated that any one of the three leading processes would impose an added cost, even when allowance was made for the sale of acid or sulfur, equivalent to an increase in fuel costs of 10 to 25 percent. The estimates, it should be noted, are based on the installation of these processes in a new, 800,000-kilowatt plant. The capital expense of fitting them into existing power stations, other studies show, would be much higher, perhaps doubling the augmented cost.

These figures are not quite so gloomy as they look. Fuel represents only about one-seventh of the total cost of generating and distributing electricity, or about 2.5 mills per kilowatt-hour. Even if the power companies were forced to burn low-sulfur fuel or were directed both to install sulfur dioxide recovery systems in new coal stations and to fit out similarly all the existing ones, the cost of the electricity generated by them-about 600 billion kilowatthours last year-would probably not rise by more than $600 million a year.

Traffic in carbon monoxide

In terms of sheer tonnage, the automobile is the country's No. 1 air polluter. According to Public Health Service estimates, it accounts for over four-fifths of the 85 million tons of contaminants emitted by all forms of transportation, including trucks, buses, railroads, and airlines. The three dangerous and obnoxious ingredients issuing from the nation's 72 million automobile tail pipes are carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and oxides of nitrogen. While it can kill a man by depriving his blood of its oxygencarrying capabilities, carbon monoxide is generally not dangerous in open places. Nevertheless, it can reach dangerous concentrations in heavily traveled city intersections and expressways. Biochemist A. J. Haagen-Smit of California Institute of Technology says the level frequently gets to 30 p.p.m. on the Los Angeles freeways enough to deprive the blood of 5 percent of its oxygen capacity if inhaled for eight hours-and sometimes reaches 120 p.p.m. in traffic jams. More trouble per ton is caused by the unburned hydrocarbons, some of them highly reactive, that spew out of cars. Their partners in crime are the oxides of nitrogen. All forms of combustion, particularly in motor vehicles and electric power stations, give off nitric oxide. Most of this is quickly converted into nitrogen dioxide, a whiskey-brown gas that is five times as toxic. When the sun shines on a mixture of hydrocarbons and nitrogen dioxide on a warm day, the result is photochemical smog.

The automobile industry has opposed controls on auto

mobile exhaust emissions outside Los Angeles on the unpersuasive ground that other cities do not yet have an acute smog problem. But Washington, D.C., where the number of cars per square mile is three times as great as in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, has already had some eyewatering days. Denver figures that 40 percent of its pollution comes from the automobile, and in New York City the car contributes a third. "We didn't have that haze until they built the expressways," says a Chicago air-pollution man, "but we sure have it now."

Most of the radical proposals for dealing with smog, even if adopted, would barely enable cities to hold their own. Turbine-powered vehicles, now being tested by the auto manufacturers, are low in pollution ("It would make your eyes bug out, it's that low," enthuses a Chrysler man), but have not yet proved out. Diesel engines are noisier and costlier than the gasoline engine and, while they emit less carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, they produce just as much oxides of nitrogen.

The only solution, for the foreseeable future, is to clean up the internal-combustion engine. Since 1963 the automobile companies have installed crankcase devices that vent back into the intake manifold the unburned gases that push past piston rings during combustion. But these "blowby" devices, which actually were used on some makes years ago and then dropped, reduce only one of the car's three pollutants, hydrocarbons, and by only 30 percent. For this reason, California state authorities, who seek to roll back the pollution in Los Angeles to the 1940 level, have insisted on controlling exhaust emissions. Chrysler Corp. has a "cleaner air package," which meets California's standards, and adds $13 to $25 to the price of a new car. The device, which sends a leaner mixture to the engine and advances the spark during deceleration for more complete burning of fuel, can be maintained for only a dollar a year more than the cost of a recommended engine tune-up, Chrysler claims. The other three auto companies have announced systems that, like Chrysler's, alter fuel-air mixture and timing. But they have added a pump that injects air into the exhaust manifold to aid the burn-up of contaminants. This system would increase the price of a new car by as much as $50. These devices are appearing for the first time on 1966-model cars sold in California.

Forcing Detroit to "find something"

The combination of crankcase "blow-by" device and exhaust controls, California authorities say, will reduce carbon monoxide emissions by 60 percent and hydrocarbons by about 70 percent. But, it will be ten years before 85 percent of the cars now on the road have them, and meanwhile the number of automobiles in the Los Angeles area may grow faster than smog is reduced. For this reason the state has ordered a further 15 percent cutback by 1970. At the moment, Detroit does not know how it will comply. "We have to find something, don't ask me what," says an official at General Motors' Warren, Michigan, research center. In addition, California may shortly set limits for emissions of oxides of nitrogen. The auto industry does not yet know how to control these, either, since they present totally different problems. But it seems safe to assume that Detroit will come up with something if it has to.

Now that Senator Muskie's bill has been passed, it is