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. 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. Accomack County has two landfills. 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. The plumbing is a series of pipes threaded through the landfill. 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.