Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004200491
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Beth Macy Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It is a typical spring afternoon and a typical day's workload - 700 tons of trash and debris, most of which is smashed and shaped into bale-sized cubes, then stacked in excavations and covered with dirt.
Samples of society's leftovers flap loose from the bales. To name just a few: an empty Valentine candy box, a holey tube sock, torn newspapers, moldy grapefruit peelings, an empty Windex bottle, grass cuttings, a mashed-up Huggies box.
"You hear so often about how bad landfills smell," says manager Jeff Cromer, standing proudly before a row of recently stacked bales. "But here we are, at the working face of this landfill, and you really can't smell much, can you?"
Cromer is a nice man, somewhat reticent though always polite. But let's be honest, Jeff:
You must have lost your sense of smell.
A tour of the landfill is a walking assault on the senses. The OSHA beeps of heavy equipment are omnipresent, signaling the frantic moves of front-end loaders and cleated, mobile trash compactors shifting back and forth, forward and reverse.
From the central point of the present fill area, there is rubbish as far as the eye can see, stacked on top of hidden rubbish that in some places dips 70 feet..
And the smell? The words rancid and putrid come to mind; the word balmy does not, although Cromer and his cronies deserve credit for being so well-adjusted.
On a recent spring day, clusters of daffodils lined the landfill's service road, struggling to bounce back from an evening's frost. Emerald ridges and the Roanoke River wind in and out of the periphery - small touches of irony in this corner of Southeast Roanoke County, the final resting place of more than 1.8 million tons of garbage in 13 years.
Especially in light of Earth Day's 20th anniversary. Millions of people across the country and beyond will be rallying today in a mass effort to intensify the public environmental conscience.
And garbage will be at the top of their environmental checklist.
An estimated 50 percent of all U.S. landfills will reach capacity by 1995. In two years, the Roanoke Regional Landfill will be stuffed full; plans for a new regional landfill are under review by the Department of Waste Management.
As a country, we produce 400,000 tons of trash a day, making us the most prolific discarders in the world. And we keep creating new forms of trash, from the 16 billion disposable diapers a year to mountains of computer printouts.
If present trends are not reversed, each American will generate 6 pounds of junk a day by the year 2000 - roughly double the 1960 output. The Roanoke Valley alone will be generating 50 percent more garbage by the year 2030, according to a 1988 study.
Figures like these keep the lowly landfill at the center of attention.
"As you can see, it just begins when you put your trash on the curb," says Cromer.
"No," adds Pete Harris, landfill superintendent, "it just begins when it's bought at the store. You buy your garbage when you go to the store."
Mummified trash
Dumps of one form or another have been around since hunting and gathering became passe, when people stopped wandering and started living in a single place they called home.
How do we know this? Archaeologists use a foolproof technique for pinpointing the location of windows and doors where nothing but the foundation remains - they look for heaps of garbage.
Indeed, there are no fast answers to the problems of trash disposal, no methods that haven't been known for many thousands of years: burning, dumping, converting it into something that can be used again, or minimizing the volume of material goods - future trash - produced in the first place.
For centuries, garbage was either dumped indiscriminately or, more commonly, burned in low-tech incinerators. But the federal Clean Air laws ended that practice in the early 1960s, and "sanitary landfills" were born.
Only planners forgot to take into account the ooze of rotting food and the potential for leachate - the witches' brew that seeps down through the garbage and into the water table. Landfills were anything but sanitary, thanks mainly to the absence of regulations.
Until relatively recently, planning for garbage disposal wasn't mandatory, says David Conn, an associate director of Virginia Tech's Center for Environmental and Hazardous Material Studies and a nationally known garbage expert.
"Traditionally, it was a local decision," Conn says. "And traditionally, localities would just find a hole in the ground and stick the garbage in."
In 1988, the Virginia General Assembly responded to the growing costs and complications of garbage disposal by passing a slew of regulations. Localities must now develop plans for waste management, including the demonstration of how they'll meet the state's recycling mandate: 10 percent by 1991, 15 percent by 1993, 25 percent by 1995.
By July 1, 1992, existing landfills must also be in compliance with a 100-plus-page code of regulations that call for double-layer synthetic liners to keep leachate from seeping into the ground, as well as intricate leachate collection systems.
Depending on how you look at it, it's almost a good thing the Roanoke Regional Landfill will be up to its brim in garbage by '92. While it has a good reputation as landfills go, it does not meet the new codes.
Since 1976, it has taken in residential and industrial trash from Roanoke City, Roanoke County and Vinton and contained it in holes lined with a single 2-foot layer of clay. While each of the landfill's five dumping areas has its own sedimentation pond designed to catch potentially hazardous rainwater runoff, the landfill doesn't have a drainage system to abate potential underground leachate.
Here's where the situation gets further complicated: New, up-to-code landfills are designed to keep air, light and moisture out, and thus eliminate leachate conditions.
But air and moisture are essential in the biodegradation process. Without them, the garbage just sits there - mummified indefinitely.
"In the old days with no regulations, it may have taken 25-plus years for all that was biodegradable in a landfill to have finished its course" and decomposed, Conn says.
"Now we may not get leachate in the short-term. But this may mean we have to monitor facilities longer after they're closed off. The implication here is that it takes longer to use the land again, to return it to a usable site."
And eventually - no one knows exactly how long it will take - the garbage may decompose, so the potential for leachate pollution lasts much longer.
Current regulations mandate that landfills be maintained and monitored for ground-water pollution 10 years after they're closed. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed changing that regulation to 30 years, a time span some environmentalists view as still being too short.
"Risk factors will always be with us," Conn says, "because so much of this is unknown."
Or as Arizona archaeologist William Rathje, a widely quoted garbage expert, writes in the December 1989 issue of The Atlantic Monthly: "At present we have more reliable information about Neptune than we do about this country's solid-waste stream."
There are only two sure bets, experts say. Landfills will always be a necessity - you can't compost or recycle everything; even incineration leaves a residue product. Recycling, therefore, will always be necessary to prolong the life of existing landfills and postpone the need for new ones. Tons of reasons to recycle
If Ann Weaver had the time and resources, she would personally drive every Roanoke Valley citizen to the regional landfill for a look at their collective garbage.
"Everyone should have to see it," says Weaver, executive director of the Clean Valley Council. "Nobody has any idea what we're facing. You look at your cans in the garbage, and you have no idea of the enormity of the problem.
"It's just staggering."
Even the good news, Weaver says, isn't all that promising. Recycling bins stationed at two area Kroger stores, for instance, in one month collected some 50 tons of recyclable drop-offs.
Compare that to the amount of trash delivered to the regional landfill: 50 tons is what they take in in about half an hour.
Right now, 8 to 10 percent of the valley's waste stream is being recycled. In the next five years, the state recycling mandate should touch every home in the valley, with various curb-side programs scheduled for introduction at staggered intervals.
Estimates vary on the amount of waste that is recyclable, mainly because of the fluctuating market for recyclables. But most garbage experts agree that a 25 percent recycling rate is attainable at minimum.
The real payoff for governments and businesses is in cost savings. Every ton that's recycled is a ton they don't have to pay someone to dump.
Some landfills in the Northeast charge localities as much as $110 per ton of garbage dumped. While the Roanoke landfill's fees are relatively low - $16 a ton for governments; $20 a ton for private businesses - costs are expected to more than double in the next few years.
In the near future, Conn predicts, more attention will be given to pollution prevention as manufacturers and consumers are persuaded to adopt less waste-generating practices. Some environmentalists have even proposed environmental labeling, in which each product would be labeled according to how much solid waste it produces.
"By and large, we don't know the waste implications of the products we buy, so manufacturers have no incentive to think about their packaging practices," Conn says.
What exactly is the landfill contributing toward reducing the amount of waste the valley generates? Money, for one thing. The landfill board has made grants available to help localities implement recycling programs.
For the first time, the landfill has offered the Clean Valley Council up to $36,000 toward its recycling-education efforts this year.
And a few months ago, the landfill purchased a $190,000 machine that turns wood from construction debris into mulch that can be sold - one way to recycle products that have already been thrown away.
Although liability concerns prohibit landfill workers from recycling or reusing most of what gets thrown away, they concede that the potential for recycling at the landfill is enormous.
"There's a lot of stuff thrown away that looks like it shouldn't be - kids' toys, furniture, carpet that's just like new," superintendent Harris laments.
"There's carpet coming in here that's better than what I've got in my house."
by CNB