A trip to the Amiss ville landfill is about

A trip to the Amiss ville landfill is about to become a lot less interesting. At the end of November Bob Duxbury will leave his post there and retire. Bob has been managing the facility full time since 2001 and worked there part time for a few years before that. This was a second career for Bob, after leaving IBM. But that hasn’t stopped him from giving it his all. As you listen to him talk about the landfill and how it works it’s clear that some part of him will miss this job. When I ask him about what he’ll miss the most he doesn’t hesitate for an instant. “The people” he says. And it turns out that working at the landfill has provided more than just a job. He’s gotten to meet a lot of very interesting people. And it’s even given him a new hobby.

Anne Harmon from Amissville stopped by the dump a few years back and started telling Bob about her bees. She’s a master bee keeper and she’s passionate about what she does. It wasn’t long until Bob had caught the bug. Bob’s now got ten hives of his own and when you ask him what he’ll do after he retires that’s one of the first things he mentions. Bob’s hives produced five gallons of honey this year, which he says is a bad year. “Rain and drought came at the wrong times this year” he explains. A normal year will produce closer to thirty gallons.

The landfill itself is changing as well. Bob says that a landfill is technically a cell and this particular cell is approaching closure. The measurement for how much a landfill can hold is airspace and the airspace at the Amissville landfill is officially just about used up. By spring it will likely have to be closed. It’s a fairly expensive proposition for a small county such as Rappahannock to run its own landfill. And so, once this ceal is closed well pay someone else to haul our garbage away. This location will remain open as a convenience center. But clearly, this is the end of an era.