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Barges will soon bring thousands of tons daily
AS A NEW ERA of trash barging approaches, the true volume and impact of the amounts of garbage to be absorbed by Virginia landfills is coming into focus. And it becomes even clearer how powerless Virginia is to regulate the amount of trash it imports.
Exactly when Waste Management Inc. will begin to barge out-of-state trash up the James River to Charles City County is uncertain. But when it starts, there will be a daily high tide of garbage floating in.
The permit for which Waste Management has applied and which will probably be granted would allow it to import 6,000 tons per day at the new dock built for that purpose at Shirley Plantation. Most, if not all, of it would then be moved along State Route 106 in Charles City County to the landfill 12 miles north.
With truckloads of an estimated 20 tons each, that's 300 trips up and 300 back along that stretch of two-lane road every day.
Need more perspective? If these trips took place over a 10-hour workday, and you stood somewhere along that road, a truck would pass one way or the other every minute during that period--600 trips over 600 minutes.
Consider this as well: Waste Management is no doubt arranging a trash strategy that involves the other dumps it operates, including the King George County landfill. Since its Charles City County landfill is permitted to accept a maximum of 6,000 tons a day, the same amount coming off the daily barges, other trash that now arrives there by truck, including Virginia's own trash, will have to go somewhere else. King George maybe?
As Jim Sharp, director of the anti-trash-import group Campaign Virginia, put it: "I'm sure they'll find a place for all the imports and local trash."
One argument Waste Management has used in support of barging is that it will relieve major highways such as Interstate 95 of the truck traffic that currently brings trash to Virginia. Don't bet on it. As long as the Old Dominion holds its arms wide open to trash imports, and Waste Management has space under the permit ceilings at the landfills it operates, it will bring trash here any way it can. That's what it is in business to do, and it will continue to trumpet the value of the role it plays in filling the coffers of landfill host communities.
Virginia officials at every level of government need to present a united front in the effort to create federal legislation that gives Virginia the legal right to regulate and limit trash imports. Until that happens, Virginia is bound by interstate commerce rules to accept trash imports.
When figures are released showing the impact of a year's worth of barged-in trash, Virginians may be appalled by what they see. They'll pine for the good old days of 2002, when trash imports were just 5.4 million tons, up only 12.5 percent over the previous year--back before the barges were bringing in nearly 2 million tons a year all by themselves.
Turning the Old Dominion into Ye Olde Landfill just doesn't cut it.