YOU CAN see them coming down I-95 through northern Virginia, spewing putrid clouds of diesel exhaust and garbage fumes behind them. Piled high with trash and oozing noxious liquid refuse, hundreds of the massive trucks lumber southbound from New York City and Washington, D.C. each day to dump their festering mounds of garbage into our state. According to a Washington Post article, over a hundred thousand of these unsafe, unwieldy trucks join a steady stream of barges and trains in slopping more than three million tons of rotting, stinking, out-of-state waste into Virginia every year ("As Garbage Piles Up, So Do Worries," Nov. 12, 1998). And the flow shows no signs of stopping. The Supreme Court denied Monday to review a lower court's decision prohibiting Virginia legislators from stopping out-of-state dumping. These trucks and the sludge that they contain must be stopped from pouring into our state. They pose devastating problems to our environment, our economy, our transportation system and our state image.
The environmental impact of landfills should be evident to everyone. Beyond the total destruction of the actual landfill areas, refuse run-off and emissions of methane gas from landfills threaten to contaminate air and water supplies. Such effects have been linked to illnesses as serious as cancer.
As out-of-state waste output increases and Virginia's waste importing increases, these effects become more difficult to prevent and control. With a higher volume of trucks and barges carrying such waste, there also is an increased probability of an accident in which garbage could potentially spill, contaminating unprotected areas of rivers and highways.
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Despite what one might think, there is some pressure from inside Virginia to continue and even expand the trash importing business. This pressure comes from poorer counties that control large areas of land and are able to make money by creating landfills within their jurisdictions. They use economic reasons to justify selling out their state.
The economic benefits of importing trash to Virginia are short-term and wholly insignificant when compared to the negative side effects. The benefits that importing and storing trash create will eventually be lost as the rolling hills and countryside gradually fill up with garbage. Any counties that build their economies on importing trash will be devastated when they have filled up all of their available land with reeking mounds of filth. Then they will be left with their economies worse than ever and their land ravaged beyond repair.
The process of getting the trash into Virginia poses major problems in and of itself. Virginia's transportation system strains under the heavy load of hundreds of tractor-trailers daily hauling their contents along the state's highways. Fatigued drivers and poorly maintained, over-used trucks have contributed to poor safety records of the vehicles in the past.
The subtlest of the damage that large-scale trash importing does to Virginia is in its state image. Three million tons of trash flooding into a state isn't the best way to encourage property values to increase. If Virginia continues to act as the dumping ground for its East Coast neighbors, our state's reputation might start to crumble. Think New Jersey.
The Federal Court's decision that Virginia must accept all of this out-of-state trash rests on the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. No state is allowed to pass a law that unduly inhibits the free flow of commerce between itself and other states.
While the maintenance of interstate commerce is necessary, interstate dumping of waste must be significantly reduced and eventually eliminated if our nation is to have any hope of surviving its own self-created ecological disaster. By allowing cities and states to simply dump their garbage "somewhere else," the federal government provides localities no incentive to limit their refuse production and develop methods for dealing with this garbage in environmentally and economically sound ways.
Simply finding new expanses of virgin countryside to defile with mounds of our own excrement may work in the short term. But it will fail us in the long run, after we have jam-packed every last nook and cranny of our nation with trash. When New York City closed its Fresh Kills landfill last year, it followed the Great Wall of China as only the second man-made structure able to be seen from space.
Now New York is sending its trucks down to us to start constructing a third glorious project. It's up to us to decide if we want to help them out or to take a stand for our state's sake, and for that of our nation.
(Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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