Copyright The Washington Post Company Jul 25, 2003

Someday soon, a barge laden with some 6,000 tons of trash will bank west at Norfolk and float along the James River, into the heart of Virginia.

Sixty miles inland, the barge's contents -- the rotting food from New York, the decomposing sludge from Maryland, the corroding metal from the District -- will be loaded onto trucks and driven a short distance to their final resting place: the mega-fill in Charles City County.

The barge's arrival will herald a new chapter in Virginia's long, lucrative and tortuous relationship with out-of-state trash. The last time waste barges plied the James, in 1998, trash fluids leaked into the river -- and five years of legislation and litigation followed. The General Assembly tried to ban trash barges from Virginia waterways, but federal courts set aside the law as an unconstitutional infringement on interstate commerce.

Now, with the state having settled a lawsuit with Waste Management Inc. and the General Assembly having passed new regulations, the barges are coming back. Waste Management, which will run the operation, has touted the barges' reemergence as a benefit to all because they allow the giant waste-disposal company to remove trash trucks from congested East Coast highways. "For every barge trip, we have 300 fewer round trips by tractor trailer," said Lisa Kardell, a spokeswoman for Waste Management.

Barging will cost the company a lot less than the truck hauling, and that's why environmentalists fear that the barges ultimately will give Virginia a notorious distinction: trash capital of the nation.

"We'll become the number one importer of out-of-state waste," said Patricia Jackson, executive director of the James River Association, a conservation group.

Virginia was the No. 2 importer last year, when it brought in 5.4 million tons of trash. The state trailed only Pennsylvania, which imported 11.7 million tons. But Pennsylvania's numbers have been declining, while Virginia's rose 12.5 percent last year, according to state figures. Jackson said she expects those trends to accelerate once Virginia's rivers open for business.

Although Waste Management has announced plans to barge trash only on the James, any of the state's rivers could be barged in the future. James River barging could begin as early as August, though Kardell said the company has not set a timetable.

The state has proposed charging a dollar for every ton of trash brought in on barges, but environmentalists such as Jackson are fighting to set the fee higher. Jackson also is battling for more stringent tests for the containers that will seal the trash, arguing that with the current measures, "we won't know if they're watertight until they fall into the river."

Virginia's Waste Management Board, a seven-member, governor- appointed body, plans to settle both issues at a meeting this morning in Richmond. The Department of Environmental Quality, which will regulate trash barging, has recommended that the board keep the proposed fee at a dollar and that it apply a less stringent standard for watertightness than the one proposed by environmentalists.

Bill Hayden, a spokesman for the department, said a stiffer fee and more stringent testing aren't necessary to protect the environment. "The standards we're recommending, they're the strictest in the nation," Hayden said.

That assurance doesn't mean much to Jackson. The Department of Environmental Quality has identified only one other state, Louisiana, that has trash-barging regulations. No other state on the East Coast has barges regularly off-loading solid municipal waste along its rivers, though trash barging regularly occurs in the Pacific Northwest.

Jackson said she worries about the effect of barging on the James, which features a rich estuary for shellfish and popular feeding grounds for bald eagles. "If you have one truck that has an accident, it's a lot easier to clean up than if a stack of containers falls into the river," she said.

The fee would help the environmental department enforce barging regulations. It also would be used to defray cleanup costs in the event of a spill and, if there's any money left over, assist in waste-related environmental programs across the state.

But Jackson questioned whether the state would raise enough money from the fees to even monitor the barges. The Department of Environmental Quality has estimated annual barging levels at between a half-million and a million tons of trash. Environmentalists say those numbers are low.

Jim Sharp, director of Campaign Virginia, a group that opposes trash imports, said that disposal companies have a huge incentive to dump their waste in Virginia because the costs of doing so are so modest. He noted that Pennsylvania charges a $7.25-per-ton disposal fee for trash dumped in that state, and that Virginia has no equivalent.

With its huge swaths of rural land, Virginia has been a popular dumping ground for years for more developed areas such as New York, Maryland and the District.

Sharp speculated that with New York City transitioning to a barge- based system for transporting its waste, Virginia and its rivers will start to look even more appealing. And that could mean problems down the line, he said.

"All landfills leak eventually. They haven't designed one that hasn't," Sharp said. "At that point, certainly New Yorkers are not going to be paying for the environmental problems that we face in Virginia."

But to Charles City County Administrator Angelia Yancey, the prospect of garbage arriving by barge couldn't be more welcome. The county receives $4 for every ton of trash that Waste Management dumps in its landfill there, a sum that has allowed the county to build three schools and to slash property taxes nearly in half.

"The benefits to the county have just been tremendous," Yancey said. "It's been great progress for us."