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not make the statement that it is devoid of life. It is simply a type of 
marine environment which does not have a great productivity. 
By spreading materials over a more extensive area, in other words, 
not letting it accumulate as it has in the New York Bight, and doing 
this in deeper waters, where there might be a greater opportunity 
for these materials to be assimilated in the water before they impact 
upon the substratum, you might have an area which could better 
receive these waste materials. As I said before, this would have to 
be done under considerable study. I have talked personally on a 
casual basis with Martin Lang who is responsible for the New York 
sewage disposal systems, and he once said that he could probably 
make available a limited number of his vessels to carry sludge to 
this area on an experimental basis. If we are going to do this, one 
of the things that must be done is to get the mdustrial sewage out 
of the domestic sewage. 
Mr. Dincetx. Industrial sewage is essentially toxic. 
Dr. Prarce. Right. 
Mr. Dincett. Whereas municipal sewage is largely oxygen de- 
manding only. 
Dr. Pearce. Yes. While domestic sewage demands oxygen and di- 
rectly smothers marine life it should not contain the high levels of 
heavy metals and materials that we find in sewer sludge that is 
routinely analyzed. Dr. Gross has looked at sewer sludge from a 
number of communities in the New York metropolitan area. He has 
found large amounts of heavy metals in the sludges before they are 
dumped at sea. When we look at the sludges after they have fallen 
to the bottom and accumulated over a period of time we find even 
greater amounts of heavy metals. Such materials must be removed 
from sewage before it enters sewage processing plants. 
This is not a new idea. This is one of the recommendations of the 
Interior Department ad hoc committee on dumping in the New York 
Bight; industry should no longer dump into domestic systems. It 
is well known in the New Jersey and New York area, that. in many 
corporate entities, for instance the National Lead Co., at Sayreville, 
N.J., when they have routine overflows, they are dumped into the 
Middlesex sewer system in New Jersey. I am not saying these par- 
ticular wastes have an immediate adverse effect; but you can imagine 
the sum total of many industries doing it, many small photographic 
processing studios dumping their waste into the domestic sewage sys- 
tem. This no longer can be tolerated. Companies must so process 
their sewage that the heavy metals and other toxic materials are 
removed before it is dumped into the domestic sewage system. 
Mr. Diner. Could you give us any appreciation of what the cost 
of dumping this matter further out would be? 
Dr. Pearce. In informal conversations with a representative from 
the Moran Towing Co., he suggested that, if Moran were given the 
mandate for hauling all of the sewage from Metropolitan New York, 
they would simply build larger tankers, not barges but real tankers. 
‘They could withstand the heavier wave action. They would be faster 
than today’s vessels so they could very rapidly move materials off- 
shore and dump it, even 100 miles out. They might be rather anxious 
to see this occur, for obvious economic reasons. He suggested that the 
