Waste Management in Virginia
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Waste, by definition, is stuff that is not wanted. What was once waste can become "wanted."
Recycled plastics are turned into park benches. Recycled paper ends up as cereal boxes, newspapers, even toilet paper. (The short fibers in recycled paper produce a rough texture, so trees are pulped and processed directly into the soft, plush rolls purchased for most American homes. Customers using public restrooms, such as sports stadiums, can't make a choice of toilet paper and may notice the different "feel" of the recycled fibers in the toilet tissue.)1
Sawmills across Virginia used to burn sawdust as a waste product, creating towers of smoke from wigwam-shaped burners. When air quality controls forced the sawmill operators to find an alternative disposal technique, a market developed for pressed wood. Many kitchen counters today consist of a thin layer of formica, on top of sawdust which has been pressed and glued into a layer of wood that is strong enough to support all the things we put on top of kitchen counters. Larger pieces of wood waste is now glued into sheets of "oriented strand board" (OSB) that competes with plywood.
The next "opportunity" to convert a waste product into something with value: carbon dioxide. Today, it is released into the atmosphere from industrial operations and power plants burning fosssil fuels, such as coal. Political pressure to address global warming concerns is likely to classify CO2 as a regulated pollutant in the future - and that may trigger new ways to use the carbon dioxide to create a product that has value, rather than a cost for disposal as waste.
Where do Virginians send the stuff they don't want? We recycle some of it, but we put the rest into the air, ground, or water. The only other choice: blast waste into space. That's not an option we use now, not even for highly-radioactive nuclear wastes.
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old wigwam burner, for sawdust
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Waste produced by Virginians may go out of sight and out of mind, but waste does not go away. All waste ends up being re-used, or ends up as pollution in the air, ground, or water.
- When Arlington County/Alexandria burns their solid waste in an incinerator, it minimizes water and ground pollution...but some percentage of gases escape the filters on the smokestacks and pollute the air.
- When Manassas sends its solid waste to a modern sanitary landfill, some gases and liquids escape the "cell" and must be processed. Methane in landfill gas is so common, both Fairfax and Prince William burn it to generate a small amount of electricity... and then exhaust the carbon dioxide and other combustion remnants into the atmosphere.
- When Fairfax County processes the sewage flushed downstream from the Fairfax Campus of George Mason University (at the Cole Wastewater Treatment Plant in Lorton), most "poop" is decomposed by bacteria and the nitrogen in the water is released as N2 molecules into the atmosphere. Solids that do not decompose as the sewage moves through the plant, mostly sludge from the bottom of the bacteria-filled decomposing tanks, are burned in an incinerator - generating lots of gases that go into the air, and a small amount of ash that goes into a landfill.
- Emissions from tailpipes of cars rise up into the atmosphere as gases, but then air-born particles from the tailpipes are absorbed by raindrops and re-deposited back on the ground. Much of the mercury pollution in our waterways comes from coal-fired power plants, where the traces of mercury in the coal are gasified during combustion, transferred across Virginia by air currents, then rained back into the creeks and the Chesapeake Bay. The atoms and molecules of mercury never "go away;" they just get transformed and transferred by our processing.
Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) generated in 2007, measured by weight before recycling
(Top 3 that generated over 50% of waste: paper and paperboard, food scraps, and yard trimmings)
Source: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
Municipal Solid Waste in The United States: 2009 Facts and Figures,
Figure ES-3
We can shift waste from disposal in water to dissemination in air. We can build better scrubbers that minimize air pollution, but leave us more residue in "baghouse" filters that must be disposed of in the ground (in landfills). We can avoid putting solid waste into landfills by incinerating it, but that creates more air pollution. We can reduce/reuse/recycle to minimize pollution.
What we can not do: we can not eliminate "waste." We can only manage where we put it, and in what form. Putting waste underground, or dissoving it into the water, or converting into gas, may disguise the existence of a waste product but does not make waste "go away."
where does soil that washes off a construction site end up?
Waste management is not a new issue. The first sanitation law in Virginia was issued in 1610, as part of the "Lawes Devine, Morall, and Martiall" to control pollution in the three-year old colonial settlement at Jamestown:2
- There shall no man or woman, Launderer or Launderesse, dare to wash any vncleane Linnen, driue bucks, or throw out the water or suds of fowle cloathes, in the open streete, within the Pallizadoes, or within forty foote of the same, nor rench, and make cleane, any kettle, pot, or pan, or such like vessell within twenty foote of the olde well, or new Pumpe: nor shall any one aforesaid, within lesse then a quarter of one mile from the Pallizadoes, dare to doe the necessities of nature, since by these vnmanly, slothfull, and loathsome immodesties, the whole Fort may bee choaked, and poinsoned with ill aires, and so corrept (as in all reason cannot but much infect the same) and this shall they take notice of, as shall be thought meete, by the censure of a martiall Court.
In the early 1900's, a Virginia state legislator reportedly said "The rivers of Virginia are the God-given sewers of the State." His assumption was that the solution to pollution was dilution in the river, and the capacity of the river to spread the pollution downstream where waste would "disappear."3
As the population of Virginia has increased, the amount of pollution we put into the waterways has increased. We have exceeded the natural capacity of streams to dilute pollution or to carry it away. Instead, streams (and even the Chesapeake Bay itself) are dying, because we have overloaded the waterways with excessive amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous, sediment, and occasionally a specific waste product from a manufacturing operation. (After discovering the dangers of the residue from manufacturing the pesticide Kepone in Hopewell, fishing was banned in the James River for 98 miles between Richmond and the Chesapeake Bay from 1975-1989.)
Especially since the 1960's, Federal and state laws and regulations have been increasingly strict on controlling how waste is managed. As a result, backyard dumps, "straight pipes" from toilets and manufacturing plants to rivers, and inefficient treatment facilities have been replaced by relatively-expensive treatment plants. At the same time, we are still spreading waste (biosolids) on agricultural fields as a soil conditioner.
outfall of clean water at Loudoun County's Broad Run Water Reclamation Facility
In 2007, Virginia had 195 permitted solid waste management facilities in operation.4 Few communities welcome the development or expansion of waste management facilities nearby. Those who object to facilities being built in their neighborhood may be driven by self-interest, but who is that surprising? There are numerous acronyms for those who object to locating LULU's (Locally Unwanted Land Uses) such as dumps, incinerators, sewage treatment plants, etc. in a particular area. NIMBY stands for "Not in My Back Yard," CAVE stands for "Citizens Against Virtually Everything," BANANA stands for "Build Absolutely Nothing Near Anyone" - and NOPE stands for "Not on Planet Earth."
One political issue is the claim that unwelcome public facilities are concentrated in areas with high concentrations of poor and minority residents. "Environmental justice" advocates contend that the placement of public facilities reflects underlying racism, while others debate the claim or suggest that low land acquisition costs are the primary determinant (not racism) for locating such facilities.
There are cases where the LULU's are closer to the rich than the poor. For example, the upper-class Montclair community in Prince William County is located downstream from the county landfill. Powells Creek drains the landfill area before it flows into Lake Montclair. Houses with lakefront property have a higher value, and the development has a popular beach where kids swim in the lake... and in the lake will be any leachate that flowed downstream from the landfill.
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- Outhouses in Virginia
- Biosolids in Virginia
- Wastewater Reuse: Eliminating Discharge to "Receiving Waters"
Links
References
1. "Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests," The New York Times, February 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/science/earth/26charmin.html (last checked November 6, 2009)
2. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, Article 1-22, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/jamestown-browse?id=J1056 (last checked November 6, 2009)
3. "An Environmental History," Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, http://www.deq.virginia.gov/history/earlydays.html (last checked November 6, 2009)
4. "Waste Reduction Efforts in Virginia," Senate Document No. 14, 2008 by Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, p.ii, http://jlarc.state.va.us/reports/Rpt376.pdf (last checked November 12, 2009)
emissions stack at Possum Point power plant, on Potomac River at Dumfries (Prince William County)
Economics of Virginia
Virginia Places