Why One WV County is Building a Landfill While Its Neighbor Shuts Down

 

Unstable Ground, Divergent Fates: Why One WV County is Building a Landfill While Its Neighbor Shuts Down

Introduction: A Tale of Two Counties

In the mountains of southeastern West Virginia, a curious story is unfolding. Two neighboring counties, Greenbrier and Pocahontas, are built on variations of the same treacherous geology: a type of unstable, swiss-cheese-like landscape known as "karst." Yet, they are on completely opposite paths when it comes to managing their waste. Greenbrier County is investing millions to build a massive, state-of-the-art landfill expansion. Meanwhile, Pocahontas County is being forced to close its landfill for good.

They share the same ground and the same environmental risks, so why are their paths diverging so dramatically? The answer is a compelling story about the unseen economic and geological forces that shape our communities, revealing how managing the ground beneath our feet is often a question of dollars and cents.

1. First, Understand the Ground Isn't Solid

To grasp this situation, you first need to understand the unique landscape of this region. Both counties sit on karst terrain, a landscape formed by the slow dissolution of soluble bedrock like limestone. In this case, it's a formation called the Greenbrier Group of limestone.

Over millions of years, water has carved this rock into a subterranean world of sinkholes, sinking streams, and underground caves. This creates an extreme environmental risk for waste management. In normal terrain, soil acts as a natural filter, slowly cleaning water as it seeps downward. In karst, surface water—and any toxic landfill leakage it might carry—can plunge directly into a sinkhole, creating what geologists call a "high-velocity, turbulent groundwater flow regime that is fundamentally different from the slow, diffuse flow found in granular aquifers." Contaminants can travel for miles underground in a matter of hours.

As geological studies of the area grimly point out, the danger is absolute:

"anything which goes into a sinkhole or sinking stream will enter the aquifer and emerge at a spring or well" with virtually no filtration.

2. Safety Has a Million-Dollar-Per-Acre Price Tag

Building a modern landfill that can safely contain waste on such vulnerable ground is an immense and incredibly expensive engineering challenge. To prevent the kind of catastrophic contamination described above, regulations require a multi-layered liner system, like the one being built for Greenbrier County's "Cell 7" expansion.

This is not just a simple plastic sheet. A composite liner system designed for karst terrain includes:

• A carefully prepared and compacted subgrade foundation.
• A thick layer of low-permeability clay.
• A geosynthetic clay liner (GCL) that can swell and self-heal.
• A heavy-duty high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic geomembrane.
• A drainage layer—essentially a network of pipes and gravel—to prevent a toxic "swimming pool" of contaminated water from building up pressure on the liners below.

The cost to engineer and install such a system is staggering, ranging from $400,000 to over $1,000,000 per acre. This immense cost is the central barrier separating the two counties and the primary reason for their different futures.

3. When It Comes to Landfills, Bigger Is Better

It may seem counter-intuitive, but for modern waste management, larger landfills are often more economically viable and environmentally sound due to economies of scale. A simple comparison between the Greenbrier and Pocahontas landfills makes this clear.

Metric	Greenbrier County	Pocahontas County
Waste Processed	~42,000 tons/year	~7,000 tons/year
Tipping Fee	~$61.00 per ton	~$95.00 per ton
Future	Expanding (150+ year lifespan)	Closing (<2 year lifespan)

Greenbrier's landfill processes a large volume of waste, nearly six times more than Pocahontas. This high volume generates enough revenue from tipping fees to fund the multi-million-dollar engineering, construction, and long-term environmental monitoring required to operate safely on karst terrain. The power of this scale is striking: a mere "5 surcharge" on Greenbrier's annual waste volume would generate over "200,000/year" for capital improvements.

In contrast, Pocahontas County processes just over 8,000 tons of waste annually. Even with a much higher tipping fee of $95 per ton, it simply doesn't generate enough income to afford the necessary safety upgrades. To raise the same capital as Greenbrier, it would need a prohibitively high surcharge, making its small scale economically unsustainable.

4. A Contamination Risk That Can't Be Ignored

While both counties share a karst geology, there is a subtle but critical difference in its structure. Pocahontas County's karst exists as a narrow band that functions as a "critical recharge zone" at the headwaters of the Greenbrier River. Here, runoff from the non-soluble clastic rocks of Back Allegheny Mountain flows downslope until it hits the limestone and immediately sinks into the ground, a direct injection into the aquifer.

Greenbrier's karst, on the other hand, is described as a "broad plain of sinkholes."

The implication of this difference is profound. A contamination event in Pocahontas County, right at the river's source, would be catastrophic for the entire downstream watershed, including communities in Greenbrier County. Given its inability to fund the robust engineering and monitoring needed to prevent such a disaster, closing the landfill becomes the only responsible decision to avoid this risk.

5. It's All Part of a Statewide Strategy

This local story is not happening in a vacuum. It is part of a deliberate, state-level policy of "regionalization." West Virginia's solid waste management plan explicitly favors having fewer, larger, and better-funded regional landfills over numerous small, underfunded local ones that pose a greater environmental risk.

The expansion of the Greenbrier landfill cements its role as a regional "hub" for waste disposal. Consequently, the closure of the Pocahontas landfill forces it to become a "spoke" in this system. This move is enabled by a specific state mechanism: the Landfill Closure Assistance Program (LCAP). By being accepted into the LCAP, Pocahontas County hands over the long-term environmental liability and management of the closure process to the state, ensuring it is handled properly while allowing the county to export its waste to a facility better equipped to manage it.

Conclusion: The Real Bottom Line

The different fates of the Greenbrier and Pocahontas landfills are not the result of a lack of will or a fundamental difference in their geology. They are determined by the critical variable of economic scale. Greenbrier County's larger economy and population generate enough waste—and revenue—to afford the expensive technology needed to manage its geological risk. Pocahontas County, smaller and more rural, simply cannot.

This tale of two counties poses a difficult question that communities across the country will have to face: As environmental standards become stricter and more expensive, how will small, rural communities manage the essential infrastructure we all depend on?