| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Laura Bliss and Rachael Dottle explore a growing environmental and health problem: Beneath layers of waste, landfills around the US have been reaching scorching temperatures, and neighbors have been getting sick. You can find the whole story online here (along with explanatory graphics). If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Last year, Brandi Howse’s annual mammogram returned a grim diagnosis: Stage 3 breast cancer. To save her life, she had her breasts removed, then her ovaries. She’s free of the disease now and continues to take medication. It was all a particular shock, says Howse, who is 50, because her mammogram the year before had been clean. Several of her neighbors on Lincoln Avenue in Val Verde, California, have similar stories of cancers, autoimmune disorders or heart problems that seemed to come out of nowhere. She and her neighbors say they can’t be sure of the cause, but given the number of people who are sick in their community of about 3,000, they have a guess. Hidden behind a foothill about 500 yards from Howse’s front door, on the northwest edge of Los Angeles County, sits Chiquita Canyon Landfill, one of America’s largest repositories of municipal waste. While the landfill has often seemed on the verge of closure, it’s grown by more than 200% over the quarter-century Howse has lived nearby. For a lot of those years, things seemed OK. The truck traffic could be annoying, pungent odors would sometimes waft into town. But that felt like more of a nuisance than a crisis until the spring of 2023, when a new level of smell settled in. The smell changes from day to day. Sometimes it’s like rotten eggs in the sun. Other times it’s more of a mysterious chemical sweetness. No matter what, it stinks. Like many of their neighbors, Howse and her family gradually stopped using their yard or going outside much at all, but the stench has continued to haunt them inside too, even with windows shut and air filters running. And it’s not just a matter of reeking garbage. By the summer, Howse says, she was taking pills to deal with an unrelenting headache. Her husband, Steven, who almost never got sick, was fighting chronic sinus problems. The youngest of their four kids, then 11, developed nosebleeds that gushed uncontrollably. Howse and her husband considered selling, but on top of the financial barriers, they struggled with the ethics of putting another family in the same situation. “We kind of feel trapped,” Brandi says.  The Howses with the Chiquita Canyon Landfill in the background. Photographer: Philip Cheung for Bloomberg Businessweek The family filed a report with the local regulator, the South Coast Air Quality Management District. At that point, in mid-2023, their complaint was one of 900 or so. By the time Howse got her diagnosis in March 2024, that number had topped 9,500. Since then, the regulator has slapped Chiquita Canyon LLC, a subsidiary of Waste Connections Inc., with hundreds of air-quality and health-code violations and ordered it to fix the place up. Yet the smell has persisted with no simple solution, because what’s driving it is something buried beneath the waste: a complex and dangerous chemical reaction whose very nature is in dispute. The state suspects garbage is smoldering underground as a result of the company’s actions. But Waste Connections—like much of the waste industry—says that nothing is on fire and calls it something else, leaving locals like Howse not only physically ill but also feeling gaslighted about what’s happening in their backyards. Here’s the assessment from California’s Environmental Protection Agency: In early 2022 a closed section in the landfill’s northwest corner began overheating, eventually reaching temperatures above 200F (93C). That’s nearly 40% hotter than the federal EPA’s standard for landfill operations. As the waste slowly cooked, it belched out toxic gases, elevating nearby levels of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and benzene, which can damage DNA and cause leukemia after enough exposure. Large amounts of leachate (basically, trash juice) built up and bubbled, boiled and even shot into the air like geysers. One such geyser appeared to gush from a landfill gas well that exceeded the legal limit for benzene, as did several other samples of leachate, according to CalEPA. Other officials cited Waste Connections for allowing the leachate to seep into waterways, an allegation the operator has disputed. Cracks and fissures have worn away at the landfill’s surface, state regulators say, threatening to rupture storage tanks of toxic leachate, which the company also denies. Health officials are investigating a possible cancer cluster because of the number of residents who’ve fallen ill. Pets have inexplicably dropped dead. Val Verde resident Erin Wakefield says she’s arrived home more than once to whole swarms of insect carcasses strewn around her property. “This is so much bigger than a trash fire,” she said at a press conference in April. “This is a state of emergency.” For about a year, Waste Connections went about business as usual, accepting trash deliveries from around LA and sucking methane out of the landfill to convert into sellable energy. After receiving several violations from air-quality officials, the company publicly acknowledged that something was wrong. (The company says it was already taking actions internally to understand and address the atypical conditions.) In an August 2023 statement on its website, it attributed the issue “to an abnormal biotic or abiotic process (also known as a landfill reaction) taking place within a portion of the Landfill waste mass.” The company emphasized one claim in particular: “This reaction is not the result of a fire or other combustion.” Waste Connections repeated this claim in a report the South Coast AQMD ordered it to produce that fall. At the very least, though, the phrase “garbage fire,” as in the online cliché for a bad situation, is an apt metaphor for the situation in Val Verde and towns like it. At least 10 other US landfills have overheated in similar fashion since 2006, and experts say there are likely far more that haven’t been reported. Chronic headaches, nosebleeds and nausea are common near these sites. At one in Virginia, steaming chimneys of gas and leachate led locals to wear gas masks and tape shut their windows to survive what they called “the beast.” At another, in St. Louis, responders once drafted evacuation plans for fear that the hot temperatures would spark a nuclear disaster at an adjoining landfill with buried radioactive waste near a community that now has dozens of cancer cases. For affected communities, part of the challenge is getting all parties to agree on what’s driving these meltdowns, or even what to call them. Nobody has the full measure of what it looks like, exactly, in the depths of the Chiquita landfill, because most of what’s happening is many feet below the surface of the garbage pile. And the range of chemical reactions that arguably constitute fire makes “fire” a slippery term. In most cases, the industry’s preferred phrase is “elevated temperature landfill,” or ETLF, which operators say has nothing to do with fire. Regulators often use technical terms like “subsurface oxidations” or “smoldering events,” what the less technically minded might call fires without the flames. The neighbors tend to just say fire. “The waste industry does not want to call it burning, even though it smells like burning,” says Becky Evenden, a former chemical engineer who lives a few miles from Bristol Landfill in Virginia. “Even though you see smoke.” The distinction isn’t trivial. Federal regulations explicitly forbid operators from running landfills in a way that starts fires. By classifying these ailing waste piles as something else, several scientists say, the industry points the finger away from their own management practices. Waste Connections disputes that characterization and many of the claims in this article. “Chiquita uses the term ‘ETLF’ to be precise, not to obfuscate,” a spokesperson for Waste Connections’ Chiquita Canyon subsidiary said in a detailed statement that cited several academic publications and an industry white paper using the phrase. “Precision in how the event is understood and described is crucial to ensuring that the appropriate response and mitigation measures are taken.” Waste Connections and other industry groups, as well as the EPA, say that the steps for stopping a landfill fire are different from those used to manage an ETLF. “There is no fire at CCL and it would greatly exacerbate conditions if Chiquita responded as if there were,” the spokesperson said. In recent years, the industry has pushed back on protections that advocates say are designed to prevent fires before they’re too late to stop. The EPA has unraveled at least one rule described as critical by environmental engineers, and court battles have only occasionally yielded significant victim settlements. In the course of reporting this article, Businessweek found that regulatory responsibility for enforcing even the most basic landfill rules varies widely depending on the region and state. Much of the data that might predict subterranean reactions—fires or otherwise—remains buried in monthly operating logs or reports filed to a patchwork of agencies, with no centralized system to track it. For many of the more than 2 million Americans who live within a mile of a landfill, what all of this means is that they’re living within a mile of a potential time bomb, with little way to know when it might go off. Without better data and stronger efforts to understand and contain crises like the one at Chiquita Canyon, it’s almost impossible to know, as Brandi Howse asks, “how much trouble are we in?” Keep reading: America’s Hot Garbage Problem |
