ABSTRACT
As long-term planning continued to be thrown to the wayside, the region slowly morphed into a thriving industrial waste site. By the late 1960s, companies were dumping toxic waste into the area's rivers at an increasing pace and the air quality was, according to federal authorities, the worst of any city in the United States. Joseph Ling's legacy includes not only looking for symptoms of waste, but also determining the causes. Ling's ground-breaking waste elimination program began simply enough by asking employees to stop being wasteful. A good way to explore waste and costs and how expensive the overall waste picture becomes is with motors. As the demand for electricity increases, such large amounts of waste and costs become difficult to ignore. Economic prosperity and job security are compromised when the financial damage from the waste a business creates exceeds the good that the business generates.
