FoundSF

Historical Essay

by David D. Schmidt, 2026

An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).

The early days of trash pickup, or scavenging, in San Francisco, c. 1900.

Photo: courtesy David D. Schmidt

From the 1850s to the 1960s, San Francisco's bay shoreline was continuously being filled with sand, soil, rock—and garbage. In the 1850s, owners of underwater lots along the shoreline hired workers to dig into nearby hills, cart sand and soil to the shore, and dump it into shallow waters. Trash was also thrown into the mix, but there wasn’t enough of it to contribute a significant portion of the fill.

As the city grew, so did the amount of trash it generated. Scavengers roamed the streets picking up castoffs that could be sold to businesses—rags (used to make paper), metal scraps, bottles, old sacks, bricks, bones, oyster shells. Some of the remaining trash ended up in Mission Bay and other open dumps, but burning the refuse in these dumps minimized the acreage needed.

The scavengers provided an early version of curbside recycling, slowly driving their horse-drawn wagons through the city and loudly calling out "rags, bottles, sacks"—for these were the items they could most easily sell. Residents would then come out of their homes carrying these recyclables.

Scavengers in San Francisco were already doing curbside recycling in the late 1800s, calling out "Rags, bottles, sacks!" Residents came out of their homes carrying these recyclables.

Photo: BANC PIC 1905.17500.10:436--ALB, Roy D. Graves Pictorial Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

By the late 1870s, garbage collection was becoming more organized. Scavengers carted their unusable waste to the Mission Bay waterfront at Sixth and Berry Streets, San Francisco’s first centralized dumpsite. By the 1880s, 300 wagonloads of waste were deposited here each day. By 1895, they had filled in 20 acres of Mission Bay.

The most pungent waste of Victorian-Era San Francisco was offal—the remains of livestock after butchers cut away the meat, bones, and other useful parts. San Franciscans ate lots of meat, but nobody wanted the stench of rotting animal carcasses nearby. The slaughterhouses had to be close to the city, in order to deliver meat quickly before it spoiled (there was no refrigeration), yet far enough away to minimize complaints. A location with tidal water flows, to carry away the offal twice daily, was ideal. Slaughterhouses clustered first at Mission Bay, and starting in 1868, at a similar tidal area three miles farther south, “Butchertown”.

Incineration, "Reduction," and Piggeries

By the 1890s, the city’s population of more than 300,000 was creating so much trash that the Mission Bay dump was becoming a nuisance, attracting rats and seagulls to a location surrounded by the growing city. City officials looked to cities in the Eastern U. S. for solutions. Big cities there were building massive incinerators to burn dry waste, and “reduction” plants to transform animal carcasses into grease and plant fertilizer.

In 1896, San Francisco granted a 50-year franchise to Sanitary Reduction Works to incinerate dry waste. The firm built a Thackeray Destructor, with the capacity to burn 300 tons per day, the following year. The incinerator, known as the San Francisco Garbage Crematory, was at the foot of Potrero Hill, on the block bounded by Rhode Island, De Haro, Alameda, and 15th Streets. The company also built a reduction plant. Tall smokestacks lifted the smoke and gases from these facilities high into the air and, with prevailing winds, over the bay.

On windless days, the smell could be hellish—particularly from the reduction plant. Every day, wagonloads of spoiled food, fish, meat, offal and carcasses (including dead horses) were dumped into vats there, cooked, and mechanically pressed to remove liquids (which flowed into the bay), leaving grease (used to make candles and other products) and a dry “residuum,” sold as fertilizer. Reduction plant workers had to endure the horrific stench.

The reduction facility had no monopoly on food garbage. Much of it was still dealt with the old-fashioned way—by feeding it to pigs. Tank wagons filled with slops from restaurants, hotels and boarding houses made daily deliveries to two dozen hog farms in the then-rural Excelsior District near the San Francisco/San Mateo County line. The piggeries included Arthur Cooey’s on Athens Street near Brazil Avenue, with about 300 hogs, John Tyson’s on Madrid Street near Persia, with about 100, and Julius Woolf’s, on the corner of Paris and Italy Streets. A visitor to Woolf’s opined that “a pig was never confined in a more wretched set of pens.” But Woolf maintained that his operation was “a lady’s parlor,” compared to Tyson’s.

Hog farms lined Islais Creek as it flowed through the Excelsior District (today it runs in a sewer pipe beneath Cayuga Street) toward its confluence with the bay at today’s I-280-101 Freeway Interchange. The creek was heavily polluted with runoff and seepage from the piggeries. In some places the pig farmers dug deep holes to keep the seepage out of the creek, but these only created another nuisance: open cesspools. People living in the vicinity, who could not avoid the odors, argued that the city should banish the hogs to points farther south.

The 1907 Plague, War on Rats, and Crackdown on Trash Disposal

The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 marked two major changes in San Francisco's waste disposal practices. First, a huge amount of rubble from burned buildings had to be cleared away. The Southern Pacific Railroad provided a convenient solution by putting this waste on rail cars at their Mission Bay rail yard, and transporting it just past the city limit via their new Bayshore rail line. The material was dumped on the tidal mudflats, and covered with soil and rock from nearby hills. The railroad rapidly filled dozens of acres of mudflats, and built a roundhouse and an extensive railroad switching yard on the new land.

Workers loading demolition waste from buildings destroyed in the great earthquake and fire onto railcars, June 7, 1906. Trains dumped it just outside San Francisco city limits, filling in dozens of acres of shallow bay waters for a railyard.

Turill & Miller, BANC PIC 1905.17500.9:055--ALB, Roy D. Graves Pictorial Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Secondly, San Franciscans were forced to stop dumping trash in empty lots when there was a citywide outbreak of bubonic plague in 1907—the same disease that killed at least one-third of Europe’s population in the mid-1300s. Though scavengers were constantly on the move looking for recyclable castoffs, before 1907 there was no requirement to make trash pickups from every home, nor for residents to use garbage cans. For scavengers, the more garbage they brought to the incinerator, the more they had to pay to burn it. This created an incentive for residents and scavengers to dump trash they couldn’t recycle into the nearest empty lot.

In the months just after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, there was no garbage collection in the burned areas, though thousands of people were working on rebuilding—and tossing trash from their lunches on the ground, where rats could feast on it.

On May 27, 1907, 13 months after the disaster, a sailor was admitted to a hospital showing symptoms of bubonic plague, and died before he could be questioned. In August, there were 13 cases, and the victims came from all across the city. By September, new cases were turning up every day. City officials recognized the dire threat of an epidemic. It wasn’t just loss of life: If the disease spread, the city’s port would be shut down, crippling businesses throughout the region.

Mayor Edward Robeson Taylor called for help from the federal government. President Teddy Roosevelt’s Surgeon General, Walter Wyman, named a task force of 16 high-ranking surgeons from the U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, and ordered them to San Francisco with all possible speed. They came by ship and train from as far away as Alaska and the East Coast.

Their first goal was to find the source of each case of plague, and then quickly eradicate all rats within a four-block radius. Rats were trapped in and around the home and workplace of each new victim, the carcasses taken to a special laboratory, and tissue samples examined under a microscope to find the plague bacteria: Yersinia pestis. Once Yersinia was confirmed, a strike force of doctors and workers was sent to the neighborhood to inspect houses and yards, fumigate basements, place poisoned bait under wooden sidewalks and in sewers, and lecture residents on what they must do: tear up wooden sidewalks, burn trash piles, cover yards and dirt floors in basements with concrete, scrub floors with lye and carbolic acid, and use garbage cans with tight-fitting lids. More than 1,700 buildings, beyond repair for purposes of rat-proofing, were condemned and demolished.

The epidemic reached its height in September 1907, with 56 cases, 25 of them fatal. Among the victims were two small boys who had found a rat carcass in a basement, given it a funeral, and buried it. The city government offered rewards of 10 cents per carcass, equivalent to more than $2.00 today (people were warned not to touch the carcasses).

In January 1908, the mayor appointed a Citizens’ Health Committee of 25 men, most of them medical doctors, to mobilize the public. The committee distributed 3,000 new garbage cans to the poor and pushed through a new city ordinance compelling residents and businesses to use garbage cans with tight-fitting lids. They conducted a saturation publicity campaign, enlisting the help of every club, association, church, and labor union. By the time it was over, the committee asserted that “the garbage methods of half the kitchens in San Francisco were reformed” through the efforts of women volunteers. San Franciscans purchased 100,000 garbage cans in 1907-08—about one for every four people in the city.

Prior to this, many city residents couldn't care less about rats. Awareness that they spread the plague was far from universal. There had been an outbreak in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1904, but poorly informed (and racist) observers assumed that the risk was confined to the Chinese community.

Health inspectors warned produce sellers, butchers, grain merchants, and grocers that they faced severe fines or jail if they ignored the inspectors’ orders. Street food vendors were warned to stop throwing food waste into the streets. It was total war on rats. Between September 23, 1907, and March 1, 1909, the effort employed 400 workers who:

• Conducted more than a million building inspections (all buildings were inspected at least once; some several times)

• Abated 141,569 “nuisances” (dirt basements surfaced with concrete, wooden sidewalks removed, trash piles burned, etc.)

• Disinfected 11,342 houses

• Demolished 1,713 houses (during a time of dire housing shortage)

• Placed more than 10 million pieces of poisoned rat bait

• Trapped 319,734 rats

• Killed an estimated 2,000,000 rats

• Analyzed 154,840 rat carcasses for bacteria (finding 398 infected with plague)

The human casualties included 160 people sickened with bubonic plague, and 77 deaths. The last fatality occurred in January, 1908, but the campaign continued for another year, until no more plague-infected rats were found. For the first time, scavengers were required to make trash pickups from every house, and any resident who refused was reported to the city’s Board of Health. People who had once dumped trash in empty lots were now sending it to the city incinerator, where the intense heat killed pathogens. But the city’s incinerator couldn’t burn it all, so the Board of Supervisors placed a $1 million bond measure on the May 1908 ballot to pay for an additional burner, and voters approved it.

The Incinerator Debacle

In 1910 the city was generating 800,000 lbs. of trash per day, equivalent to two pounds per person per day. By then, following the anti-rat campaign, San Francisco was one clean city. To ensure they’d get the best available incineration technology, city officials consulted New York City waste disposal expert and civil engineer Rudolph Hering. On Hering’s advice, they solicited bids on the new incinerator contract with exacting specifications to ensure more complete combustion and consequently, less air pollution.

The Power Specialty Company submitted the lowest bid. The firm built a new incinerator next to the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Islais Creek trestle in 1913, near the slaughterhouse district, Butchertown. The new facility not only burned trash, it heated boilers to run turbines that generated electricity.

The new incinerator was put through a four-week test in September 1914, burning an average of 109 tons of trash each day. Nearby residents complained about odors. City officials claimed the facility did not meet specifications. Power Specialty disagreed and sued the city to follow through on the contract. The city maintained that the incinerator had sometimes fallen below the specified minimum temperature of 1250 degrees F., and released odors, “obnoxious gases,” smoke, and dust.

View west from about Evans and Marin. Twin Peaks, Peralta Heights, Islais Creek Incinerator smokestack and Isolation Hospital (Army and De Haro) in background. Houses on northeast ridge of Bernal Heights, background left. June 15, 1923.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp36.03062

The city lost the case initially, but refused to operate the new incinerator. The facility was never again used to burn trash, and eventually was turned into a warehouse. At Mission Bay, filled in completely by 1910, rail cars were filled with partially-burned trash from the old incinerator, to be dumped on the tidal flats just south of the city limit.

The city government bought out the old incinerator, the Thackeray Destructor, in 1918 and paid the Scavengers’ Protective Association, a cooperative of hundreds of Italian garbage collectors, to operate it. In the absence of a new incinerator, the old one was being loaded with up to 600 tons per day—twice its design capacity. The result was an increase in smoke and odor emissions, as well as a greater volume of half-burned garbage.

In 1926, the San Francisco Development Co., a group of landowners who lived near the incinerator, sued the city and the scavengers, seeking relief from the air pollution. In a May 17, 1929 court hearing, city officials admitted that burning embers from the incinerator’s smokestacks had landed on nearby rooftops. They admitted that the smoke was excessive and its smells noxious. On June 5, 1929, the court held for the neighbors, declaring that the burner was a nuisance and should be replaced by a new, cleaner model. The court postponed any decision on a remedy until after the November 1929 election, with five propositions on the ballot dealing with waste disposal.

Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors sent City Engineer Michael M. O’Shaughnessy on a tour of Chicago, New York, Toronto, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon to compare their incinerators. His August 5, 1929 report recommended building a trash burner like one he’d seen in New York City.

The ballot questions gave San Franciscans a choice between landfilling and incineration, but the results were muddled: Voters approved one proposition calling for incineration, but rejected another requiring the city to build an incinerator. They rejected measures to stop incineration, to dump all waste at the bayside county line site, and for the city government to take over the job of garbage collection and disposal.

In 1932, with no progress toward building a new incinerator, the court ordered the old one to shut down. After 36 years of smoke and foul smells, residents of Mission Bay and Potrero Hill could breathe easier.

Bayside Dump Becomes “Sanitary Landfill”

The incinerator shutdown immediately increased the volume of trash dumped at the bay shore landfill just south of the city limit. Waves battered the edge of the fill, exposing fermenting garbage and carrying trash away at high tide. These problems were solved in the late 1950s by building dikes between the bay and the trash, and covering the trash with a layer of soil or crushed rock each day.(1) The technique was developed by Jean Vincenz at the Fresno Sanitary Landfill in the mid-1930s, and became a model for enlightened waste disposal for the next 40 years. The Fresno Landfill, in fact, was briefly designated a national historic site in August 2001—until news media reported that the site was on EPA’s Superfund list for toxic waste cleanup.

“Sanitary Landfills,” as practiced in Fresno, San Francisco, and thousands of other places, were a great advance for public health because they prevented smoky dump fires and minimized odors, rats, flies, and wind-tossed trash. However, contaminated liquids seeping downward (or outward) from these landfills could pollute groundwater or surface waters. As early as 1936, observers at the San Francisco bayside site noticed that this leachate dispersed into the bay:

“At extremely low tides during the winter a black liquid occasionally is observed seeping outward [toward the bay] from the lower portion of the fill. This seepage has an exceedingly disagreeable odor. Fortunately it creates no nuisance, because it flows almost immediately into the bay waters.”(2)

City Engineer John J. Casey estimated that the landfill was 50 feet deep, with about half of that below the original bay mud level, due to the tremendous weight of many layers of trash and earth pressing the bottom layers downward into the soft mud.

The city’s garbage had come full circle in just 40 years: From dumping in the bay (at Mission Bay), to incineration, to more “sanitary” dumping in the bay. The latter two practices, adopted as solutions to protect public health, would later be abandoned as harmful to public health and the environment.

The rock and earth for the landfill’s daily cover came from a nearby hill. Dynamite charges, a power shovel and four dump trucks removed 580 cubic yards of rock from the hill five days a week, year after year. By the early 1960s, the hill was nearly gone, the Bayshore (101) Freeway had been built along the landfill’s bayside border, and the dump had expanded a mile southward, getting closer and closer to the community of Brisbane.

Meanwhile, at Islais Creek Channel, and seven other points along the city’s southern waterfront, dumps of various sizes continued filling the bay with commercial and industrial waste. In 1958, newspaper columnists lampooned the city’s new bayside baseball stadium, Candlestick Park, as “Candlestink Cove.” The largest dump left within the city limits in the 1960s was the city-owned operation at Islais Creek Channel, filling 155 acres of the bay with 900 tons of trash, demolition debris, and industrial waste per day.

The Battle of Brisbane Lagoon and San Bruno Mountain

Starting in 1957, when the new section of the 101 Freeway opened just south of the San Francisco/San Mateo County line, everyone traveling from SFO to the city had to pass the reeking repository of San Francisco’s solid waste, a million tons per year, which was gradually filling tidal Brisbane Lagoon with trash. It was a shock to first-time visitors expecting scenic vistas (see Filling the Bay/Saving the Bay chapter).

This dump was operated by the Sanitary Fill Company, an alliance of San Francisco’s two garbage collection companies. Soon after Brisbane incorporated and created a city government for the first time in 1961, Sanitary Fill made a secret bargain with three members of the city council: For the next 30 years, allow San Francisco’s 1,600 tons of garbage per day to be dumped into 250 acres of Brisbane Lagoon that the company had just purchased, and Brisbane would get $30,000 per year, plus property taxes forever from the new land on top of the landfill. In 1962, Sanitary Fill began building dikes to enclose the 250 acres.

Two years later, when the secret bargain came to light before Brisbane’s Planning Commission, they rejected it, but the city council had the final say. Council members waited until after their 1964 re-election campaigns, then approved the landfill expansion by a 3-2 vote. This decision touched off a "constant, constant uproar," in Brisbane, according to Dr. Paul Goercke, a Brisbane anti-dump activist. Dump opponents, led by Luman C. Drake and Brisbane Citizens for Civic Progress, petitioned for a referendum. The council set the special election for September 21, 1965—four days after the effective date of a new state law stopping the filling of any bayside wetlands subject to tidal action.

All summer long in 1965, Sanitary Fill’s trucks rumbled day and night to complete one dike in Brisbane Lagoon, and another enclosing a rectangle of open water at Sierra Point on the bay side of the 101 Freeway. At 6:00 a.m. on August 26, as Brisbane residents looked on from the hillsides, Sanitary Fill completed the dike at Brisbane Lagoon. They also completed the Sierra Point dike in time to beat the deadline.

In the special election, Brisbane voters rejected the city council's dump deal. Sanitary Fill made a new offer with more money for the city—which the council again approved. Opponents again petitioned for a referendum, but this time voters approved the deal.

But the battle didn’t end there. Control of Brisbane’s city government see-sawed between the pro-dump and anti-dump factions. The diked area of Brisbane Lagoon reached capacity by November 1966, so the company prepared to fill its 105 diked acres at Sierra Point. Brisbane voters had passed an initiative to ban dumping there, but Sanitary Fill had nowhere else to put San Francisco’s 1,600 tons of trash per day, so the company obtained a court order stopping Brisbane from enforcing the initiative.(3) When the Sierra Point site was full in 1970, the city of Mountain View, 30 miles south of Brisbane, opened its own bayside landfill for San Francisco’s waste, on hundreds of acres of land that had subsided below sea level due to groundwater pumping.

Sierra Point was developed with office buildings atop the trash layers in the 1980s and 1990s, but the last 160 acres of Brisbane Lagoon are still open water. A mile north, overlooking the 101 Freeway, there’s a stairstep pattern in San Francisco’s Bayview Hill, carved by bulldozers in the 1960s shaving away rock and earth to build the dikes and cover the landfills at Brisbane Lagoon and Sierra Point. Nearly 60 years after dumping ceased, however, nothing had been built on the Brisbane Lagoon landfill, because its 50-foot-thick layer of garbage made the ground too unstable to support heavy structures.

Trucking the waste an extra 30 miles to Mountain View doubled disposal costs, giving San Francisco’s two garbage collection companies an incentive to reduce the volume by recycling. They started in the early 1970s by using magnets to collect metal from the waste.

By the late 1980s, at the city government’s insistence, Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal had initiated citywide curbside recycling pickups. In 1996, they began collecting food garbage from wholesale produce markets, farmers’ markets, and grocery stores, for composting. By 1998, they were recycling 40% of San Francisco’s waste. The scavengers too, had come full circle: As in the old days, they were again scavenging (recycling), not just landfilling trash.

By 2001, collection of food garbage for composting was underway at 1,000 San Francisco restaurants (out of about 6,000) and half a dozen schools, where teachers and students had volunteered to sort their lunch garbage. The downtown Hilton Hotel, the largest on the West Coast, alone collected more than 4,000 pounds of food garbage daily. The food waste was trucked to Solano County for the three-month process of conversion to rich plant fertilizer.

By 2003, every residence in the city had been given a special green bin on wheels for its compostable food and garden waste, a blue bin for other recyclables, and a black bin for the rest. By this time, the city was diverting 300 tons of food waste per day from landfills, to make 50,000 cubic yards of compost per year—enough to cover 11 square miles of farmland. And the numbers grew steadily, because the city charged restaurants less for compost pickups than landfill disposal. Scoma's at Fisherman's Wharf, which recycled 90% of its waste, saved about $10,000 a year.

To sort all the paper, cardboard, bottles, and cans collected in the blue recycle bins, in March 2003 the city's garbage disposal franchise holder (new name: Recology), opened a new facility, "Recycle Central" in a warehouse at Pier 96 on the southern San Francisco waterfront. Inside, mechanical sorting systems use conveyor belts and blasts of air to help workers separate the different materials.

In 2009, San Francisco became the first major U.S. city to require residents and businesses to set aside food and garden waste in bins for composting. By 2011, the city had collected a million tons of food waste—more than a ton for every resident. Overall, the city was recycling or composting an incredible 78% of its waste (measured by weight).

Shoreline Amphitheater’s Gas Problem

In 1968, the city of Mountain View bought the 544-acre Shoreline site, nearly a square mile of diked bayside wetlands. San Francisco then paid Mountain View for the privilege of dumping its trash there from 1970 to 1983. Throughout the 1970s, the Shoreline Landfill accepted 1,800 tons of waste per day—more than any other dump in the Bay Area, a total of 6 million tons in just 10 years. Mountain View also dumped its own garbage there, and at the adjacent 150-acre Vista Slope landfill.

When these landfills were full, they were capped with impermeable clay and plastic, topped with soil, and planted with grass and shrubs. In 1982, Mountain View opened Shoreline Park, a 180-acre golf course and public open space, and the Shoreline Amphitheater. By this time, San Francisco’s trash collectors had lined up the Altamont Landfill east of Livermore to receive their city’s waste. But Mountain View’s problems were just beginning.

In October 1986, a man attending a Steve Winwood concert at Shoreline took a cigarette lighter from his pocket and flicked it with his thumb. Instead of producing a tiny flame, it produced a five-foot-high geyser of fire that singed the hair of a woman sitting nearby. This and similar incidents, and the resulting lawsuit, induced Mountain View and Sanitary Fill to install a $2.5 million methane gas collection system.

Methane—natural gas—is a product of the decay of organic waste like food and garden clippings. This can only take place with water. At Shoreline, a contractor had neglected to cover the waste with an impermeable membrane (4) (in addition to soil), allowing water irrigating the grass to seep through cracks in the soil, allowing methane to form.

Mountain View sold the gas to PG&E and Laidlaw Gas Recovery, to mix it into PG&E’s natural gas pipelines. But methane still percolated upward, killing large patches of grass. Golfers were losing their balls down mysterious sinkholes. The golf course shut down, and its operator sued the city of Mountain View.

In December 1994, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge James R. Grube ordered the city to pay $4.1 million to the bankrupt golf course operator. Grube said Mountain View had violated state law by failing to remove methane from the landfill. By this time, the city had installed new piping to extract methane. The golf course got a new irrigation system and new turf, and reopened. After that, the quality and quantity of gas declined. By the late 1990s, the gas was being flared—burned at the end of a pipe on the site.

Altamont: Battling the Mega-Dump

The 232-acre Altamont Landfill, near Altamont Pass east of Livermore, is environmentally preferable to the old bayside dumps because it lies far from any waters or wetlands, and its nearly impervious clay soil prevents groundwater contamination. Also, it gets very little rain, minimizing the potential for runoff to mix with the waste. By the time San Francisco began trucking its trash to Altamont in 1983, the landfill was already receiving garbage from Oakland and other East Bay cities.

Earthmovers put a thin daily cover of soil onto trash from all of San Francisco and much of the East Bay at the Altamont Landfill, east of Livermore.

Photo: Christy Shake, 1997.

San Francisco gained the distinction of having the Bay Area's longest "garbage commute," with trucks making daily round trips of nearly 100 miles. And thanks to San Francisco, Altamont became the region's largest-volume dumpsite, receiving up to 5,000 tons of garbage per day, or 1.6 million tons per year. This was more than twice the daily volume of Mountain View’s Shoreline Landfill, the highest-volume operation of the 1970s. But Altamont's owners, Waste Management of Alameda County, had even grander visions.

In 1995 Waste Management (owned by WMX Technologies Inc., the world's largest garbage disposal company), proposed to expand the Altamont landfill by 1.2 square miles. This would have allowed 160 million more tons of garbage—about 23 tons for each of the Bay Area’s roughly seven million residents.

Alameda County environmentalists were incensed. They had recently reached an interim goal of reducing the county's waste volume by 25%, thanks to Measure D. The initiative set a goal of 75%. Recycling advocates feared the proposed mega-dump would undercut efforts to meet that goal—and make Altamont the garbage destination for most of Northern California’s cities.

The county board of supervisors voted 3-2 in December 1996 to limit Altamont's extra capacity to 80 million tons, but still allowed daily tonnage to more than double. Environmentalists weren’t satisfied, arguing that traffic and air pollution generated by garbage trucks would also double. A coalition including the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Northern California Recycling Association, a group of local landowners, and owners of a competing landfill sued the county to stop the expansion.

In September 1998, a San Francisco Superior Court Judge overturned the county's approval. A year later, Alameda County announced a compromise that allowed the dump to add another 250 acres, but limited annual garbage intake to the then-current level of 1.6 million tons. The mega-dump proposal was dead.

The agreement also set a $1.25 per ton fee on garbage dumped, to fund open space preservation, recycling education, and other efforts to help communities meet the state-mandated goal of recycling 50% of all trash by 2000.

By the 1990s, the Altamont Landfill was a state-of-the-art facility. Below the waste lies a seven-foot-thick, multi-layer barrier system to prevent contaminated liquids from reaching the soil. Perforated pipes in the barrier collected contaminated water, or leachate, pumped to a treatment plant and cleaned through chemical and microbial action. Tank trucks sprayed this treated water on the landfill's unpaved roadways to reduce dust. Other pipes collected the methane gas generated by rotting garbage. This gas was burned in an on-site generating station, creating enough electricity to light the landfill and power 6,500 homes.

Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com

Notes

1. Stefanelli, Leonard Dominic, Garbage: The Saga of a Boss Scavenger in San Francisco (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2018), p. xiii.

2. Engineering News Record, Feb. 27, 1936.

3. Stefanelli, op. cit., 98-100.

4. Stefanelli, op. cit., pp. 111-112.

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Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.