How to Get Rid of 85 Million Pounds of Rotting Food

ONCE THE FIRE WAS OUT AT THE LINEAGE WAREHOUSE in Boyle Heights and the noxious smoke stopped blanketing the surrounding neighborhoods, the scope of the next environmental disaster became clear. 

There were still 85 million pounds of rotting food left at the site — some of it mixed into a slurry of flame retardant, burned insulation and sooty firehose runoff — baking in the hot summer sun. It’s a nasty mess that includes shellfish, various kinds of meat, boxes and other packaging.

Lineage, the company that operated the massive cold storage facility, is responsible for getting rid of all that festering food, though they are working with a long list of subcontractors to do it. 

Nearly a month after the fire, the lengthy cleanup process is still in its early stages, and neighbors remain barraged by nauseating odors and an invasion of rats and bugs. A tracker on Lineage’s website shows how many trucks of waste have been removed, so angry residents can see the progress for themselves. 

But as the number ticked upward, I remained obsessed by another question: Where, exactly, were all these trash-laden trucks going? 

For years now, the export of Los Angeles’ trash has been provoking rage in outlying rural communities, many of them poor, who contend that badly managed or overfull landfills are sparking fires, emitting disgusting and harmful odors and even causing ill health effects. The region’s hulking dumps and the complex calculus of whose trash goes where is politically fraught and sometimes veiled in secrecy.  

For days, I asked Lineage and the company’s consultants questions about where the food waste was being taken, with no answers. I found the lack of clarity both mystifying and maddening, because this information is eminently knowable, and in the public interest.

As of Monday, 275 truckloads of waste had been removed in a process that began more than two weeks ago. Those trucks are not simply driving off into the sunset. They’re going somewhere, and they are supposed to be following strict regulations as they do it. 

The city’s Emergency Management Department’s recovery website offered a few more details, but far from the full picture: “Municipal solid waste” (a catchall term for everyday garbage) was being brought to the Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Granada Hills, and food waste was “being moved to Riverside County.”

By land mass, Riverside County is roughly the size of New Jersey. Shaped like a long, narrow dresser drawer, the county spans from the edge of the greater L.A. area all the way to the Arizona border. “Riverside County,” therefore, did not narrow it down for me. 

My colleague Tomo Chien and I spent an afternoon parked outside the cold storage facility’s burned-out shell this week, trying to talk to neighbors and workers, and potentially follow a truck to suss out where the trash was going. Like most journalism stakeouts, this one was unsuccessful, though at least there was access to a porta-potty at the site, which is rare when surveilling. (We can now definitively report that the blocks around the east side of the site smell far worse than the inside of a porta-potty on an 88 degree day.) 

Without official information to go on, I turned to sources in Riverside County and ultimately confirmed that at least some of the rotting food waste was headed to El Sobrante Landfill, a massive dump about 55 miles southeast of Boyle Heights, near Corona. 

El Sobrante made headlines last year after a chemical reaction commonly described as an underground landfill fire triggered broiling temperatures and toxic sulfur pollution, as the L.A. Times reported. The issue remains ongoing. A county enforcement agency cited the facility for a violation during a May inspection report, after it found that temperatures exceeded 170 degrees and carbon monoxide concentrations exceeded federal standards in certain areas. 

The landfill’s recent history has already raised alarms for at least one advocate. 

“Anywhere this waste goes is problematic. But to send it to a landfill that we know is on fire — Sobrante has a major response happening right now,” said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental justice group California Communities Against Toxics.

But Kim Ohrt — a spokesperson for Waste Management, the landfill’s corporate owner — said the issue was unrelated to the Lineage waste. 

“Elevated temperatures at El Sobrante Landfill are confined to a limited, closed area that has been proactively managed since it was first identified. These mitigation activities do not affect daily operations and are occurring more than 3,000 feet from the active disposal area,” Ohrt said.

Wes Speake, the vice mayor of nearby Corona, said he was not worried about the incoming trash from Lineage and praised Waste Management for how forthcoming they’d been with local officials.

“I think this is frankly what a landfill is for. [Trash] has to go somewhere,” Speake said. “And it being rotting food — I can think of a lot more things that would be a lot more worrisome to me.”

El Sobrante’s manager asked regulators for an emergency waiver in late June, which would allow the landfill to exceed the normally permitted amounts of waste it can accept on a daily and weekly basis to “provide urgent” support to the Lineage disaster cleanup. Riverside County granted the waiver on July 2. As of Tuesday, El Sobrante had received more than 1 million pounds of food waste from Lineage.

But El Sobrante’s official response about the Lineage trash also raised further questions: They were only taking “some” of the food waste, they said. So where was the rest of it going?

The answer, according to a daily summary report from Lineage that goes to dozens of people in various state and local government agencies, is that the rotten food is going to two other main sites. 

More than 330,000 pounds of spoiled food waste have been taken to the Simi Valley Landfill in Ventura County, which has the same corporate owner as El Sobrante. (That landfill applied for a similar emergency waiver from the county; the request to take on more waste than usual was not granted, but the facility can accept waste as long as it adheres to its regular limits.) An additional nearly 280,000 pounds have been trucked to a facility known as Hazmat TSDF Inc. in San Bernardino County — a site that takes hazardous waste. 

It’s unclear what is being taken to the hazardous waste facility, or whether it’s being designated as such.