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BACON'S
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It's heartening to see our legislators finally
do something about all that trash from New York. No, I'm not talking about
Howard Stern. I'm talking about the kind of garbage with maggots and flies.
The thought of that fetid, Empire State waste rolling down our highways, floating down our rivers, and piling up layer after layer in our landfills is enough to make a strong man gag. But, ladies and gentlemen, the danger is far graver than you realize.
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| It has come to my attention that trash atrocities are not limited to our interstates and rivers. They occur in our neighborhoods, right outside our very homes. I've seen them with my own eyes: huge garbage trucks lumbering down my back alley. Not once or twice a year, but every week. I can personally testify that trash is exposed to the open air as the truck compactor opens its maw to gobble more refuse. I have personally witnessed scraps of garbage spill onto the cobblestone! |
Literally hundreds of garbage trucks roam our streets every day. And what do our municipalities do with this vile substance? They recycle a bit and incinerate a trickle. Then they bury it in landfills -- just like they do with that New York garbage.
Virginians, we are strangling in our own offal!
Yet there is no outcry. Where is the outrage? Why aren't our lawmakers addressing the horror of home-generated trash?
OK, you get the point. The debate over the interstate transportation of solid waste has been notable mainly for hysteria and ignorance. No one has accused me of saying anything nice about Northerners before, but I guess there's always a first time. The fact is, taking trash from New Yorkers is not a big deal. It does not transform Virginia into a dumping ground. It does not pollute our landscape, our rivers or our ground waters.
Indeed, I'd go so far as to say we ought to be grateful to New York for sending its garbage. Virginians are profiting from the hysteria and ignorance of upstate New Yorkers who don't want that city trash defiling their communities. As a result, New Yorkers are paying Virginians millions of dollars every year -- creating jobs and funding schools in some of our poorest counties -- and helping finance state-of-the-art landfills for the disposal of our own waste.
Let's look at the facts: New Yorkers are sending us roughly 5,000 tons of trash per day, all of which goes into modern commercial landfills. No one knows exactly how much trash Virginians generate, but we can make a good guess. Nationally, one person creates an average of 4.3 pounds of municipal solid waste per day; 6.8 million Virginians translate into 14,620 tons. That means we're generating almost three times as much garbage as New Yorkers are shipping us -- and nobody gets hysterical about that.
People are acting as if New York garbage is somehow grosser than Virginia garbage -- as if they're trucking down container loads of used condoms, heroin needles and bloated corpses. For all we know, they could have shipped Jimmy Hoffa's body down here.
Where do the Yankee bashers suppose that our fine, upstanding Virginia trash winds up? I'll tell you: About 5,000 tons per day, or one-third of our own, home-grown garbage, gets dumped in old municipal landfills exempt from the environmental regulations governing the commercial, state-of-the-art landfills.
Commercial facilities built since 1988 place an impermeable barrier between the garbage and the ground. The top layer consists of a woven geotextile. Under it, a layer of free-draining material (i.e., rocks) is interwoven with pipes that bleed off methane gas and drain off the leachate resulting from rain percolating through the garbage. Under that, there's a second layer of geotextile, a second layer of rocks and a second drainage system, a third geomembrane, then two feet of compact clay liner. There is zero tolerance for lax landfills: Any leak subjects the owner to disciplinary action.
What kind of protection do the older landfills offer? Very little. When selecting locations before 1988, municipalities looked for a place with some clay, bulldozed the trees and dumped the trash. Some might have put down a single liner. None of these older dumps are subject to zero-tolerance regulations.
And we're worried about New Yorkers' trash?
Compounding the folly, some people are distressed by the idea that New Yorkers are shipping their garbage to Virginia by barge, despite the fact that barges place the trash in double-walled containers and have a much greater safety record than trucks. Restricting barges would be a calamity for Northern Virginia by putting an additional 1,333 heavy vehicles per day on crowded Interstates. Furthermore, trucks would increase fuel use by 826 percent, boost exhaust emissions by 709 percent, and -- this is my favorite -- require an additional 2,746 truck tires to be disposed in landfills every year.
Give me Richmond over Manhattan any day. Give me the companionship of Virginians over New Yorkers. But, folks, if they want to send us their trash, I'll take it -- along with their cash.
James A. Bacon
Publisher & Editor in Chief
