Pollution Prevention

Despite 15 years of research, the Navy has made little progress in developing equipment to process solid waste aboard ships, as required by a 1973 treaty. The Navy has spent more than $50 million to develop four types of shipboard solid waste processing equipment--a vertical trash compactor, a solid waste pulper, a plastics processor, and a metal/glass shredder. However, only the plastics processor is moving ahead at this time. Prior planning to reduce the discharge of ships' solid waste was not well-coordinated and did not include interim milestones for measuring progress toward minimizing waste. Coordination for the Navy's expected November 1996 plan has improved, but still suffers from a lack of tasks and milestones.

GAO found that: (1) the Navy's two prior plans for meeting shipboard solid waste discharge requirements were not well-coordinated and did not include interim milestones for minimizing waste until 1998 or later; (2) the Navy would benefit from examining other federal agencies' and commercial carriers' solid waste disposal experiences; (3) although the Navy has improved coordination for its November 1996 plan, the plan still does not include tasks or milestones to achieve near-term compliance for waste other than plastics; (4) by the time the Navy submits its 1996 plan to Congress, it will have 4 years to develop and install new technologies to meet the discharge requirements; (5) the Navy does not have an approach to meet future legal requirements for solid waste discharges; (6) the Navy has spent $52 million of the $80 million appropriated through fiscal year 1994 on discharge equipment; (7) three of the Navy's four primary developmental projects have been cancelled, suspended, or reduced; and (8) although two Navy ships have reported progress in complying with solid waste discharge requirements, the Navy has not given adequate consideration to whether lessons can be learned from the experiences of non-Navy ships and individual Navy ships that report progress in complying with discharge requirements.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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