Solid Waste Disposed in Virginia’s Permitted Facilities (2007)
Source: Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, "Waste Reduction Efforts in Virginia" Table 1
Virginia had no state regulations controlling disposal of solid waste until 1971. The Virginia Department of Health took the initial lead in closing open dumps, since they were breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
In the last 40 years, the focus on waste management has increased dramatically, and the state Department of Environmental Quality has the lead role in regulating solid waste disposal. We've defined types of waste, distinguishing hazardous waste (toxic materials), liquid discharges from wastewater treatment plants, construction and demolition debris (C&DD, including discarded lumber, broken chunks of concrete, and stumps from construction sites), and other categories.
Recycling focuses on municipal solid waste (MSW), generated in our houses and at our offices/stores. Municipal solid waste is described by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as including "durable goods, non-durable goods, containers and packaging, food wastes and yard trimmings, and miscellaneous inorganic wastes."1 It's the waste we see every day in garbage cans, and the focus of extensive education efforts to get people to reduce, reuse, and recycle. However, recycling is not a new practice in Virginia.
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. Thanks to the residues and discarded tools, we have enough evidence of knapping changes over time to 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.
|
|
| recreated "dungery" at Mount Vernon, where George Washington managed animal manure and compost as a fertilizer resource | |
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 in a city, dung was a waste product. Imagine the smell and flies in Virginia's urban centers today, if we did not have the internal combustion engine to provide the horsepower for transportation.
Next time you're in Colonial Williamsburg, notice how little horse manure is on the streets. That might reflect traditional conditions when Williamsburg had little activity. However, during meetings of the House of Burgesses, the place was packed with legislators and assorted other hangers-on (people who came to town for one of the rare moments of entertainment in the days before movies, radio, TV and the Internet). At those times. horse manure might have covered the streets and added a special ambience to the scene.
Horse manure faded as a solid waste management problem, after the widespread adoption of cars and tractors. However, if you ride horses today, you may be one of the few who still know the "joys" of mucking out the stalls and replacing the straw in a barn. In addition, modern gardeners, like George Washington, may collect manure for use as a soil conditioner.
Piles of bottles, cans, and waste metal are still common in Virginia woods, where farm families once disposed of household waste, but nearly every house's solid waste is carried to a landfill now. (It is still legal for households to compost their organic kitchen waste.) As a result of modern pollution control laws, waste disposal even in rural area of Virginia with a widely-scattered population requires centralized landfill operations. In most rural communities, homeowners carry their waste to a transfer station - often green metal boxes, designed to contain liquids and block rats/raccoons/bears from getting into the garbage, until a truck hauls the trash to one of the sanitary landfills remaining in Virginia.
When population density reaches a certain threshold in urban areas, 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 2007, Virginia had 195 permitted waste management facilities, including construction and demolition debris "stump dumps," 60 active landfills accepting municipal solid waste, and 11 waste-to-energy incinerators. According to the DEQ statistics, 23 million tons of solid waste were processed in 2007. The landfills accepted 15.9 million tons of municipal solid waste, of which 5.6 million tons was imported from out of state.
Constructing and operating a landfill is a big business. Attempts to limit out-of-state imports of solid waste have been blocked by a Supreme Court ruling that garbage is commerce, and the Federal Constitution requires that states treat the commerce in waste the same way they permit commerce in sale of coffee cups, computers, etc.
Attempts to impose a "tipping fee surcharge" (to at least tax the producers of out-of-state waste) were vetoed by Governor Gilmore in 1999, and rejected by the General Assembly in 2002. According to a state report,2
EPA has a national goal of 35% recycling rate. (Recycling rate is the total tonnage of recycling, divided by the total tonnage of solid waste collected.) Virginia now exceeds that level, though the state's minimum standards are significantly lower. Virginia has two recycling standards: a 25% standard for recycling municipal solid waste, except for communities with population densities less than 100 persons per square mile or with an unemployment rate 50% higher than the statewide average. Those communities are only required to recycle 15% of the municipal solid waste generated within their boundaries.
In 2007, only eight Solid Waste Planning Units (SWPU')s reported recycling rates that did not meet minimum state standards. "These eight SWPUs account for less than three percent of the State’s total population and produced approximately three percent of the total MSW generated in Virginia in 2007... Six of the eight planning units have population densities near or below 100 persons per square mile, qualify for the 15 percent mandated rate, and rely mainly on drop-off sites to collect recyclable materials."3
