The earliest Virginians salvaged all the possible value from their stone tools before discarding them. When the sharp edge of a rock knife became dull, the Native American flint knappers would chip away at the edge to sharpen it again. If a tool broke, the tool makers would rework it to serve another purpose, until the rock was finally discarded. We can speculate on changes in settlement patterns based on changes in the tool types, such as "Clovis" and "Folsom" points, that we find in archeological sites.
For perhaps 10,000 years, the "waste" in Virginia was very minimal. Hunting and gathering bands took full advantage of the animals they hunted, using the meat for food, the bones and horns and teeth for tools, the sinews for the equivalent of string and rope, the hide for clothing, and the animal brains for tanning the hides to delay their decay.
There were some discarded items, or course. Large mounds of discarded oyster shells were piled up in middens, after the meats were extracted for food. After Native Americans in Virginia adopted agriculture about 3,000 years ago, stable settlements developed where the travelling bands chose to stay in one place for longer periods of time. The Indians used pottery to store their food. Shards of pottery crafted in different styles survive in many locations across the state, providing additional clues regarding who lived where...
They also created agricultural waste from the parts of corn, bean, and squash plants that were not eaten, but this was organic material that quickly decayed in Virginia's climate. Modern archeologists have to struggle to retrieve and identify tiny parts of plants and animal bones to determine what people were eating at a particular site prior to the 1600's - unlike oyster shells, the plant remains were quick to disappear.
The European colonists brought a dramatically different culture, and dramatically different waste patterns. Even before 1607, there were European trade goods circulating in Virginia. The Spanish who landed on the Middle Peninsula in 1570 brought a variety of alien metal and cloth into Virginia. Some ended up being worn as decorative clothing by the Natives after the Europeans were killed, and ultimately were discarded somewhere. Archeologists find glass and metal items in post-contact, but pre-Jamestown sites that clearly came from European sailors trading for food and other items along the Atlantic coast.
The English who settled permanently in Virginia came unprepared for the Virginia environment. Excavations at Jamestown show they brought suits of armor, for example. More importantly from a waste management and archeological perspective, the European culture was far wealthier in worldly goods and their trash pits reflected it.
Had the English abandoned Jamestown permanently in 1610, rather than returned after meeting Lord Delaware at the mouth of the James River, their artifacts would be found only in limited areas. Obviously, the English settlement of Virginia continued and ultimately European cultures supplanted Native American cultures.
Had Virginia been rich in gold and silver, mining debris would have been a substantial part of the waste stream here after 1607. You can still find a tiny residue of slag and iron ore in Chesterfield and Prince William counties, left over from the earliest iron works, but the Virginia colony quickly adopted tobacco farming as its economic base.
Plantation agriculture producing a staple crop created scattered garbage sites. When examined today, we find household debris (broken crockery and bottles, worn-out utensils, and especially tobacco pipes with different size stems) and farming debris ("tired" tools, metal clips used on harnesses for mules and horses, etc.) Slave cabins included items that had once been used in the mansion house but since transferred to the lowest class, plus occasionally some evidence of African culture such as glass beads arranged carefully in special patters for spiritual/mystical reasons.
Since Virginia lacked urban centers until the middle of the Eighteenth Century, most waste pits reflected the lifestyles on individual plantations and their associated quarters or isolated houses on the frontier. Williamsburg, the capital of the colony from 1699-1780, had a different culture and a different waste stream from Stratford Hall or Mount Vernon, or the farms in the Shenandoah Valley.
In rural Virginia, household waste disposal was easy - farm families could just dump their debris behind a ridge or in a depression in the pasture away from the farmhouse. For 3,000 years, that's how farmers handled the little stuff. Technological innovations such as tin cans created more-obvious and longer-lasting waste piles, somewhat comparable to oyster middens, but most waste was still organic and decomposed easily.
The most significant item of solid waste in Virginia farms or towns was probably animal waste, until cars and tractors became common in the 1920's. Horses produce horse manure in the cities, and on the farms cattle created vast quantities of dung. The farmers recognized dung as a valued resource, a fertilizer to spread upon their fields - but imagine the smell and flies in Virginia's urban centers today if we did not have the internal combustion engine...
After the widespread adoption of cars and tractors, horse manure faded as a solid waste management problem. However, if you're still a horse owner, you may be one of the few who still know the "joys" of mucking out the stalls and replacing the straw in your barn.
Waste disposal in a rural, scattered population does not required centralized operations. When population density reaches a certain threshold in urban areas, however, it makes sense to have a waste disposal service collect garbage from homes and businesses and carry it away. Arlington County reached that threshold at the end of the 1920's. When Arlington implemented curbside collection in 1930, it was so attractive to the residents in the town of East Falls Church they gave up their charter as a town in order to take advantage of that county service.
In the 1980's, Arlington and Alexandria realized they were running out of landfill space for disposal of solid waste. They joined together to build a joint waste-to-energy facility, implementing a new technology to solve an old problem.
As described in a "State Wants to Close 39 Landfills" news article in The Virginia-Pilot on August 14, 2000, the original proposal in the General Assembly would have created new fees to compensate those affected by the more-stringent environmental mandates. The cost to close a landfill is relatively clear, compared to the social cost (especially in human health) if an unsafe site is permitted to continue operating. Asking a small rural county to absorb those costs directly was not the original plan of the General Assembly, but Governor Gilmore effectively blocked imposition of what he perceived as new taxes.
DEQ is doing its job - and the managers of the landfills are complaining about the requirements being too strict, too expensive, too fast... Northampton County claims it will cost $3 million to close the Oyster Site landfill by 2010 - but the facility is already expected to reach capacity in 2 years. Accomack County has two landfills. According to DEQ, "Bobtown" South should close in 2005 and "No. 2" should close 15 years later. Closure will block expansion of the facility.
Landfills are high-tech operations now. It's no longer acceptable to find an isolated tract of land not too far from an urban area, dig a pit, then build a mountain of garbage. Now the landfills are built as cells with double liners on the bottom and intricate plumbing systems at different levels. , A thick cap of watertight clay is added to the top of each cell, to block rainwater from seeping into the garbage and then into adjacent grounwater.
The plumbing is a series of pipes threaded through the landfill. It is needed to collect the juices ("leachate") that are squeezed out of the garbage, plus groundwater/rainwater that manages to seep into the landfill and become contaminated. The pipes carry the leachate to water treatment facilities, where thecontaminants are separated from the water. Some of the contamination can be eliminated by incineration or bio-remediation. In other cases, concentrated sludge from the water treatment plant is carried back to the landfill and buried there. Once the landfill is oficially closed and sealed with clay at the top, in theory the waste is isolated from the surrounding environment.
The Oyster Site landfill may stop accepting new waste in 2003, and may be "closed" in 2010, but it will be watched for decades afterwards. Leachate continues to seep from the garbage as it gradually compacts and chemically changes. Decomposition of organic material is slowed in the anaerobic (oxygen-deprived) environment, but not stopped completely. You'll hear stories of landfills being opened decades later, where newspapers had hardly turned yellow and hot dogs with mustard looked just as good as the day they were tossed in the trash. It takes time, but all that material will gradually degrade.
In addition, landfills create methane and other types of gas that bubble up to the surface and can crack the cap, if the pressure is not released. In addition to lechate pipes, modern landfills have plumbing for gas collection. If you drive Interstate 66 near Fair Oaks Parkway after dark, you can see the flare used to burn the methane coming from the now-closed landfill adjacent to the interstate.
The two Eastern Shore counties may try to build new landfill facilities, to replace the ones being forced to close. However, there are great economies of scale in landfill construction and operations. It's inefficient to build small facilities, and it's unlikely that the two counties could afford to borrow the necessary funds for a large high-tech facility. There's just not enough population or industry on the Eastern Shore to make a large facility an attractive investment.
The Hampton Roads communities already have a regional disposal authority; they're unlikely to ship garbage across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge... and the greatest waste disposal challenge across the Maryland line is processing chicken manure (and dead chickens), not municipal solid waste. Most likely, Accomack and Northampton will establish waste transfer facilities rather than new landfills, after the existing landfills on the Eastern Shore close.
Transfer stations are temporary collection points. Garbage trucks pick up the waste, and at the transfer station it's moved into large tractor trailers. In Fairfax County, the trailers are a distinctive tan color, and are commonly seen carrying loads from the transfer station at the old I-66 landfill to the waste-to-energy facility (incinerator) at Lorton or the Prince William County landfill. On the Eastern Shore, garbage from a transfer facility could go to the regional Southeastern Public Service Authority waste-to-energy facility or landfill, especially if the $10 toll for one-way traffic across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is reduced.