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David Scherer Water
By David Scherer Water
I toss an empty milk carton into my curbside trash can, then I decide to follow it 300 miles to the place where all Olympia garbage goes: a gigantic landfill near the Columbia River.
The first stop is a facility tour at the Hawk's Prairie Waste and Recovery Center ("The WARC"). The tour offers a tangible sense of how much solid waste we produce.
At more than 600 tons of solid waste per day, our region is about even with national averages, but local litter doesn't linger long. It can't. Twenty years ago, Olympia overwhelmed the Hawks Prairie landfill and held a ceremonial closing of the historic dump with the somber burial of its last bag of trash. Today, the city's garbage is hurried away by trucks and trains to the Roosevelt Regional Landfill in south central Washington.
The WARC tour is peppered with crushing statistics like: Thurston County's daily garbage volume is equivalent to dozens of school buses. If garbage exports were to stop, a crisis would follow. Officials say it would only take seven days to qualify for federal disaster relief.
From county to canyon
After getting smashed in the back of a Scorpion, my milk carton gets further depressed by the powerful WARC compactor. Then it's placed in a green and white shipping container. These containers are individually trucked from Lacey to the train yard in Centralia.
There it's loaded onto a specialized rail car. The Centralia graveyard shift "Trash Train" leaves once each night, and once is enough — it's 50 to 100 cars long. It heads southeast via the BNSF railroad, passing through the Gorge in the dark, when rail traffic is light.
At dawn, my milk carton has reached the small town of Roosevelt. The shipping container is lifted by a massive gantry crane off the rail car and onto an off-road truck that hauls it up the hill along a dirt road to the landfill site.
Making a mountain
The Roosevelt landfill is owned by Republic Services. It isn't a hole in the ground. It's the opposite. It's a mountain in the making, a reverse pit mine. At just above 2,500 acres, this is one of the largest landfills in the United States. To allow for a multi-decade lifespan, it's divided into different zones. At any given time, the active dump zone is only 1–2 acres.
Before the arrival of my milk carton, during a monthslong preparation period, a zone is graded and lined with layers of compacted clay. Then it's covered in long 20 to 30 foot wide rolls of thick plastic sheeting to prevent leachate (trash juice) from reaching groundwater. The strips of plastic are sealed together by a robotic thermal fusion welder. Once the zone is covered in a single gigantic waterproof tarp, it's ready for my milk carton and millions of tons of other trash.
My milk carton falls out the back of the shipping container. Hundreds more are unloaded, creating a layer of trash that's around 20 feet deep. The trash gets massaged for a day by a small herd of compactors — trucks that weigh over 100,000 pounds and have spiked metal wheels. The massage is over when the layer is reduced to 10 feet thick.
Now that my deeply crushed milk carton and its neighbors are sufficiently dejected, a new layer is started with some soil and another roll of thick plastic sheeting. Layers are added until the total depth reaches 300 to 400 feet. To put that in perspective, if you stood at the bottom of a fully filled landfill, the ceiling of trash above you would be higher than a 35-story skyscraper.
Layers are just the beginning. As the trace amount of milk in my carton decomposes, methane gas is produced. Instead of letting it escape, plumbing has been installed to capture the gas to generate electricity. Some of it is refined into natural gas and fed back into the regional supply. Additional plumbing sucks the trash juice out of the bottom. This gets treated like sewage or put to work moisturizing the dusty dirt roads.
As the trash above my milk carton gets higher, there's immense pressure — not just from the machines, but from the millions of tons of waste pressing down from above. Over time, my milk carton sinks deeper. A landfill this size might lose 30 to 50 feet over several decades, just from settlement.
Roosevelt uses a canyon-fill and mound method. Because the site is located in a natural high-desert depression, they can fill the bowl of the canyon and then continue mounding it upward. Going deep is more efficient than going wide because it requires less thick plastic sheeting per ton of trash. It also keeps the footprint smaller, leaving more of the 2,500 acres for buffer land and wildlife sanctuary.
Each truck in that herd of heavy compactors uses GPS to fine-tune their landscaping efforts and help them reach the desired shape. Too steep and it could fall over. Too flat and rainwater will pool. Recently, the county-approved maximum altitude for a trash heap was increased from 1,820 to 2,050 feet.
Out of sight
Eventually, we'll just call it a hill. It'll be green, grassy, and serene — a monument to disposables hiding in plain sight, engineered by satellites to prevent a trashvalanche. Perfectly sculpted so we'll forget what's underneath. Kids will roll down it. Someone will fly a kite. There might be a bench with a nice view.
And under that bench: milk cartons, batteries, broken toys, cords that don't go to anything anymore, and whatever it is we ordered at 11:30 p.m. that felt important at the time.
The environmental technology being deployed at the Roosevelt landfill is a radical improvement from what we did even 20 years ago, but it's still a place where the scale of American waste is impossible to ignore.
On this 56th Earth Day, I'm trying a new approach: less in, less out, and fewer milk cartons that need to be buried 275 miles away.
This is David Scherer Water's one year anniversary at The JOLT. To celebrate, we gave him a JOLT email (david@thejoltnews.com) and an official JOLT press badge. David has been proudly wearing it everywhere. He's not the only thing labeled. The labels on David's recycling bins include: batteries, bread tags, bubble wrap, cardboard, compost, food waste, bottle caps, fabric scraps, glass, lightbulbs, candy wrappers, junk mail, plastic bags, printer cartridges, sawdust, foil, wire, styrofoam, meat trays, packing peanuts, and tin cans. Please follow David on Substack.
Tanker1982
Great article! Thanks!
Wednesday, April 22 Report this
Chloeandme
I appreciate this article so much! Thank you for choosing to do the ‘dirty work’ so that we can see the truth. Our family recycles and compost food as much as we can. I pay close attention to the guidelines from Lemay for recycling. We also have been using Ridwell for additional recycling. Ridwell has been in amazing game changer! What they take is repurposed into other very useful products. It also supports new businesses that repurpose my trash. We now have a tiny garbage can. Please consider doing an article about Ridwell. It started in 2018 in Seattle! Just with a kid and his dad! Thank YOU
Wednesday, April 22 Report this
Snevets
Thank you! Happy
Wednesday, April 22 Report this
TomBoucher
In the 90's I had the honor and duty at the Dept of Ecology's Yakima office to inspect and regulate this place. If you have a shred of doubt about how your government protects you day in and day out, do a little light reading:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1996-03-12/pdf/96-5529.pdf
Wednesday, April 22 Report this
TomBoucher
Ahem: the usual link folderol. Try this:https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1996-03-12/pdf/96-5529.pdf
Or search for: Standards of Performance for New Stationary Sources and Guidelines for Control of Existing Sources: Municipal Solid Waste Landfills
Wednesday, April 22 Report this
peterpumpkinhead
I think it might be eye opening to follow our recyclables in a "Pure Recycle" article. My suspicion is that it just ends up in a landfill overseas somewhere.
Thursday, April 23 Report this
wildnature
Wow, David. Thanks for your information to educate all of us as to the impact of our daily lives. These are the kinds of things we should be focused on at our one minute to midnight situation of environmental disintegration. Instead of unneeded greedy political garbage going on, that distracts from working out our very survival on this beautiful planet.
Thursday, April 23 Report this
Bornite
Very nicely researched and written. This is the reality of our waste disposal in 2026 and for decades to come. This did not need to happen nor does it need to continue. The truth is the Roosevelt Landfill WILL FAIL. For instance, the plastic layers in the landfill to stop decomposing garbage from seeping into the underground aquifers and into the Columbia River have a "design life" as does the landfill itself. In engineer speak, that means it is only designed to function for a specific period of time. Even clay has a permeability factor. A proven environment clean technology to eliminate landfills (not incineration) was proposed in Thurston County years ago before the Roosevelt Landfill existed. It was tragically rejected in favor of landfilling.
The landfill will close someday and all the decomposing organic waste will have to be dealt with. What will your answer be when your children and grandchildren ask you why you allowed this to happen?
Thursday, April 23 Report this
Tish18
Thank you so much for this, David. I concur that it would be very helpful for you to do something similar tracking recyclables. I also
want to give a shout-out to Ridwell. It is a real game-changer. They do not have pickup everywhere yet, but you can subscribe to their mail service for multi-plastic waste (chip bags), plastic film, prescription bottles, and lids (including cottage cheese and yogurt lids! They mail you out pre-paid bags, you fill them, and drop them off at the Post Office. They send you an email telling you they received your bags. I love it. I am able to recycle so much more these days.
Monday, April 27 Report this
Olywelcomesall
Great research project David! It’ll be interesting to see if the new campaign to shift our drinking habits to reusable cups is successful. 4 billion single use coffee cups thrown away each year in Wa and into Roosevelt Pit. https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-recycling-waste/reduce-reuse/bring-your-own-cup
Tuesday, April 28 Report this
HappyOlympian
Superb article loaded with previously unknown info, deserved a more prominent place on JOLT.
Wednesday, April 29 Report this