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(Continued from Page 1) ment of Waste Management has been moving “cautiously and deliberately” in overhauling the Commonwealth’s regulations for waste disposal, not only for sanitary landfills but also for incinerators, transfer stations, industrial landfills, and construction, debris and demolition landfills. Ms. Bailey said the reasons for the caution and deliberation are threefold:
• It’s important that the regulations be “good enough to last for the next several years.”
• The regulations will be expensive for local governments.
• “We don’t want to have to do it all over again to comply with the new federal regulations.”
The first draft of the state’s revised waste management standards were developed by a technical advisory group last year, then circulated through the Department of Waste Management and to various individuals for review. The next draft will be released this fall, with copies to go to all county administrators and city and town managers; this draft will be publicized at meetings held around the state to receive reaction, Ms. Bailey said. Then the proposed regulations will go to the Waste Management Board in the late fall with the final promulgation to come next spring, she reported.
Most of the attention has been focused on municipal dumps handling “good ol’ garden variety garbage, what’s thrown out after dinner.” This is “the last frontier in environmental regulatory awareness,” according to Ms. Bailey.
The environmental problems associated with sanitary landfills are just being recognized, she said, noting that two of Virginia’s 19 nominations for the national super-fund clean-up list are landfills. And with 7,000 open dumps in Virginia just 10 years ago and more than 3,000 abandoned landfills counted to date in the state, “we’ll probably have more proposed,” Ms. Bailey acknowledged.
She described the solid waste disposal regulations now on Virginia’s books as “woefully inadequate,” written back in 1971, “a prehistoric date as far as environmental regulation goes.” Not only are they “inadequate to protect the environment,” but they’re difficult to administer since specific standards are few and detailed information is lacking on what must be submitted with a landfill permit application, she said.
But through administrative requirements for design and monitoring systems, “we’ve provided a good deal of environmental protection” with the landfill permits issued over
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