The smoking, stinking disaster at the Chiquita Canyon landfill in Castaic is a glaring example of the environmental and public health dangers created by burying our trash, and how state and local leaders have allowed this problem to accumulate.
As county and state leaders consider what to do with the landfill, they have to deal with another problem: If they close Chiquita Canyon, the trash will simply be trucked to another landfill in the region, shifting the emissions and environmental impact to another community. That's because Southern California, like most of the state, is still too reliant on this primitive method of waste management.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Almost two decades ago, the city of Los Angeles adopted a visionary plan divert 90% of the city's trash from landfills by 2025 through recycling, composting food waste, and developing new facilities that can convert trash into energy. That goal is still in the books, but the city stopped calculating its diversion rate after the state switched to per capita disposal rates. Still, it's clear that the city is nowhere near 90%; Los Angeles residents and businesses sent about 4 million tons of waste to landfills in 2022, according to data from CalRecycle. By comparison, the city removed 3.7 million tons in 2004.
Los Angeles County set a goal to divert 80% of its waste from landfills by 2025. Today, the county diverts about 66% from landfills, but still sends 11 million tons to landfills each year .
What happened?
First, city and county officials did not predict the rise of waste production, particularly single-use plastic. Residents and businesses generated far more trash than experts projected, and not just in Los Angeles. California and the United States More have also been deposited in landfills. California's recycling rate was 41% in 2022, up from 50% a decade earlier.
Experts blame the growth of e-commerce, which has significantly increased the amount of shipping materials in the waste stream, and the rise of plastic packaging, fast fashion, and disposable and lower-quality products on the market. Most of the bubble wrap, air pillows and plastic wrap that arrive at your door. end up in a landfill. Plastic takeout containers and small electronics and appliances, such as toasters or DVD players, are typically thrown away rather than repaired or reused, and often cannot be recycled.
The collapse of the global market for recycled materials did not help. China, which had been the world's largest buyer of plastic waste, banned most imports of plastic and paper in 2017, and other countries have restricted imports. Since then, recycling centers in the United States have struggled to find places that accept, much less reuse, the plastics that people throw in the blue bin. In some cases, recycling centers are simply sending your plastic to landfills.
And that's another problem.
State and local recycling rates are misleading. State law requires jurisdictions to measure their recycling rates by how much stuff goes into the blue bin versus the black bin, not by how much is actually recycled. In reality, most of the things thrown into blue bins are made from materials like plastic, which are too difficult or expensive to transform into new products.
So although cities boast high recycling rates, a significant amount of material is still sent to landfills or exported to foreign countrieswhere it can be recycled, landfilled, incinerated or, worse yet, end up in rivers and oceans. Artificially high diversion rates obscure the reality that most California communities still rely heavily on landfills.
While we generated more trash, the promise of facilities that could turn it into useful things was never fulfilled. The city and county envisioned building “conversion technology” plants, which are common in Europe and Asia, and use thermal, biological or chemical processes to convert waste into energy. The idea was to develop facilities here that could process food scraps, yard waste, some plastics and other materials left over after paper, glass and recyclable plastics and green waste were separated from the waste stream.
But they ran into several obstacles at the local and state level, said former Councilman Greig Smith, who developed the RENEW THE plan to help reduce the city's dependence on the Sunshine Canyon landfill in its San Fernando Valley district.
Environmental groups and some lawmakers opposed the technology because they equated conversion plants with incinerators that burned trash and polluted nearby communities. The research showed that such plants met air quality standards in the countries where they operated and could meet California's strict standards. Still, skepticism, as well as regulatory, permitting and funding barriers to the new technology, hampered its widespread adoption. And it was easier and cheaper to continue using landfills.
Meanwhile, these facilities are critical to the state's aggressive goal of reducing the amount of food and green waste sent to landfills by 75% by 2025. Cities have struggled to meet the mandate, given the need to develop recycling facilities. composting and conversion of waste into energy. to handle all that material.
But Los Angeles and California are now facing the consequences of our throwaway culture. The decomposition of organic waste in landfills is a major source of planet-warming methane emissions, slowing the state's fight against climate change. There is growing concern about the proliferation of plastic waste, with small microplastics found in drinking water, food and the human body. And the stench of simmering at the Chiquita Canyon landfill, coming from a part of the landfill that closed years ago, is a reminder that burying trash has serious long-term environmental impacts.
To help, California lawmakers adopted a groundbreaking law in 2022 to begin phasing out all varieties of single-use plastics by 2025. But it will be phased in over a decade, and in the meantime, landfill space is running out. . Los Angeles County projects its 10 active landfills will be full in 15 years. And the city and county of Los Angeles' ambitious zero-waste plans to reduce their reliance on landfills are meaningless without political will and leadership to make change.
The simmering environmental crisis at the Chiquita Canyon landfill should be a wake-up call to state and local leaders that they can no longer avoid making difficult decisions about trash. It would be an environmental tragedy to expand or build new landfills when there are smarter and more responsible ways to manage waste.
