Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 2, 1990 TAG: 9005020137
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CYRIL T. ZANESKI LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CHARLES CITY LENGTH: Long
"I saw us ending up a dumping ground for all of Virginia and all of the East Coast," said Bonnie Ware, who led opposition to the county's plan to play host to a large, privately operated landfill.
But the fight faded quickly. Seeing that the landfill would generate millions of dollars each year that would pay to build badly needed schools, Ware and her neighbors welcomed Chambers Development Co. of Pittsburgh and the potential 2,000 tons of municipal garbage a day it began receiving last week.
Ware was among the guests Monday at the dedication of the 289-acre landfill, which is to hold 25 million tons of garbage over the next 20 years. As a member of a citizens advisory panel, she helped oversee construction of the $20 million landfill, Virginia's most sophisticated. It is the first built under tough new state waste regulations and a model for dumps that will follow.
"This is certainly like nothing I could have imagined," said Ware, a county resident for 14 years and the owner of a kennel. "The main complaint I've been hearing now is that the citizens have not been able to get in to see it."
Accustomed to pitching their trash for years into a 15-acre pit tended by a bulldozer, many of the county's 6,700 residents are curious about what lies beyond the tidy landscaped driveway that seems better suited to a country club than a landfill, Ware said.
The Charles City County Sanitary Landfill is to rural dumps what the space shuttle is to the Wright Brothers' plane.
Everything about it is state-of-the-art, designers say. Automated probes at its gates will "sniff" for hazardous chemicals in each truckload of garbage; triple barriers of synthetics and clay will separate trash pits from the earth; a double sewer system will suck up pollution that leaks through the triple liners; and an automatic wash will rinse trash trucks with recycled storm water before they leave the property.
"A good landfill used to be a place where you kept trash covered with dirt each day . . . and hoped for the best," said County Administrator Fred A. Darden. "But what you are looking at here is the future."
What that future appears to promise is that garbage will play a major role in the economies of some rural counties because of new state solid-waste management regulations.
The impact of those regulations, perhaps the state's toughest environmental controls, is only now beginning to be felt. Approved in October 1988, the rules pack a 254-page manual; the rules they replaced took only seven pages.
To protect water, air and wetlands, the regulations will force many rural dumps to close sooner than expected. And they will push the costs of replacing them beyond the means of many localities.
One of the state's most recent environmental crises centers on a landfill in Alleghany County that accepts large volumes of out-of-state trash. The furor over the Kim-Stan Landfill led Gov. Douglas Wilder to call for the halting of out-of-state waste shipments to Virginia during his campaign last year.
But Wilder, like Ware, apparently has modified that position. He attended the dedication of the Chambers landfill.
Darden, the county manager, said fears about out-of-state trash coming to Charles City County withered as the company assured residents that it would employ tough controls to assure that the waste accepted would not be hazardous.
"We decided as a county we were going to worry about what comes to the landfill rather than where it comes from," Darden explained.
Of course, the county had little choice. Its old dump will be full in just six months, and Chambers offered a lot of money. The new landfill will add $1.1 million to $2.5 million a year to the coffers of a county that now collects $1.8 million in real estate taxes, Darden said.
Unable to afford their own landfills, some rural counties are considering combining resources to build regional facilities or contracting with major waste management companies that can afford to meet modern landfill specifications.
Unable to wait for creation of a regional authority, Amelia County, which is about 50 miles southwest of Richmond, has followed Charles City County's lead. The Amelia Board of Supervisors this year signed a contract with Chambers, which is seeking zoning approval for a 624-acre landfill site.
That landfill would generate as much as $5.9 million a year for Amelia, which has an annual budget of about $9 million.
The waste management business is booming all over. Chambers, for example, has watched its revenues soar from $15 million in 1985 to $181 million last year. But the 20-year-old company is still tiny compared with the industry's two giants: Waste Management Inc., which earned $4 billion last year, and Browning Ferris Industries Inc., which earned $2.6 billion.
Chambers is focusing its efforts on the South - Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida - where trash-disposal rates can be far lower than in the Northeast.
In many Northeast cities, it costs more than $100 to dispose of a ton of garbage; Chambers says it will cost $38 for each ton dumped in Charles City County. So far, though, no space is reserved for out-of-state trash.
The infusion of cash is expected to enable Charles City County to build new schools for all 1,100 of its students and replace buildings built in the 1930s and 1940s.
Moreover, Darden said, the contract with Chambers will enable the county to take over the landfill and the 934 acres it is built on when the dump is filled.
Some environmental groups view the shipment of garbage from the Northeast to the South with alarm.
"The garbage issue - and particularly out-of-state trash - has become the top-priority issue in many rural communities," said Pete D. Castelli, the Virginia organizer for a non-profit group, Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, in Arlington. "There are consultants coming in to tell us all about jobs and how good it's going to be. But they're just selling our back yards for dumps."
by CNB