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price would not be prohibitively expensive. Now I do not have facts 
and figures on this, now. 
I have also talked to certain individuals in my local community who 
suggest that they could take existing tankers and convert them to 
sludge barges in order to move materials offshore. They say they could 
do this at a price which is competitive with the current inshore dump- 
ing. Mr. Henry Engelbrecht, 104 Ilers Drive, Middletown, N.J., has 
a proposal which includes a comparative budget for dumping at sea. 
Using large, specially converted tankers, he believes he can haul 
sludges 125 miles offshore for $1.11 per ton. Current costs range from 
$0.72 to $0.93 per ton for hauling sludge to the existing grounds and 
a cost override of $0.005 to $0.03 for each additional ton-mile. I am 
sure that Engelbrecht, the Moran people, and others could furnish 
this committee with additional information. 
Mr. Dinecett. What would be the effect of dumping? Is there an 
area where the sea is really essentially an ecological desert in great 
depth ? 
Dr. Pearce. No. A colleague of mine at Woods Hole, for instance, 
has worked in the abyssal depths, the deeper parts of the ocean. Dr. 
Sanders has found that in many cases there is more marine life, at least 
more diversity of marine species, in the deep waters than there are in 
the shallow, so you cannot say that there is any place either in the high 
seas or the coastal waters that is a biological desert. Every natural area 
supports some form of life. Even when you go great distances to sea 
and the plankton becomes very sparse, there is still significant life 
there. For all we know this life is extremely important in some food 
chain or some ecosystem many miles away. Mr. Miller mentioned 
earlier the Gulf Stream which moves along our shores and to Great 
Britain. We do not know, for instance, the consequences of building 
a huge dam and using the Gulf Stream as a source of power. It was 
readily appreciated that if you slowed down or shut off the flow of 
the Gulf Stream, this would affect the climate in Great Britain, so I 
don’t think this argument or hypothesis got very far. 
Much the same is true with biological aspects. You may do something 
in Florida or in North Carolina which will directly influence the 
fisheries or the marine life in New Jersey. We cannot think of bio- 
logical activities as ceasing at arbitrary barriers, be they boundary 
lines of States or nations or zoo-geographic zones. As I mentioned, we 
know so little about the inshore environment, how can we possibly un- 
derstand the deeper waters to warrant using them as unlimited dump- 
ing grounds at this time in history? This 1s true; I don’t think you 
would find any competent marine scientist who would argue with this 
statement. 
Yet there are all sorts of proposals for waste disposal in deep waters. 
The Philadelphia-Wilmington-Trenton area is talking about develop- 
ing a huge trunk sewer system. There is a feasibility study underway by 
the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. These people would like to see 
or are at least studying the possibilities of moving tremendous amounts 
of waste some 80 miles offshore to water about 1,600 feet and dumping 
it there. Our marine laboratory has been participating in a study 
of the marine life with this group. We have made three cruises. What 
we now know is infinitesimal compared with what we should know 
to make this kind of decision. 
