Houston's trash problem is only getting worse. What will it take to get it ...

This story by MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellow Elena Bruess was originally published in the Houston Landing, where it appears with additional photos and resources. It is the first in a series of articles examining Houston's mounting trash troubles.

 

Even with the car windows rolled down, it’s hard for Angela Jackson to know exactly where the stench is coming from. It could be the garbage lining the sides of the road or the trash lumped into a massive hill in the distance. Either way, she wrinkles her nose and tells her son, LaVon, to record a video on his phone. 

It’s mid-March and Jackson is driving down North Green River Drive in East Houston. On her left is her neighborhood – an alcove of modest, single-story homes she’s lived in for over two decades. On her right, and looming straight ahead like a mountain, is the McCarty Road Landfill, one of the city’s largest waste operations. Everything in between – from broken couches to bags of old dinner scraps – is trash. 

The smell, a mix of rotten eggs and decomposing meat, is everywhere. 

“We need to document this, get this on video,” she says to LaVon, gesturing out the window. “We can’t keep living in this. This stink, this trash. It’s terrible.” 

Jackson isn’t the first to say Houston has a trash problem. For decades, there has been a never-ending debate over trash and waste operations in the area, which have disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities in places like East Houston. All over the city, residents like Jackson and her son have complained about the amount of illegal dumping of garbage in their community, and the massive landfills like McCarty that can emit a trashy smell on hot or muggy days. 

These issues have become more pressing with time. As the nation’s fourth-largest city, Houston is expected to produce 5.4 million tons of waste annually by the year 2040, up more than 1 million tons from 2020. Most of this trash will go to Houston’s five municipal waste landfills, including McCarty. But the city is quickly running out of landfill space, leaving officials at a crossroads: either continue on the same path or move to more sustainable solutions. 

For the past several months, the Houston Landing has explored waste operations in Houston, the problems it poses and the subsequent solutions, finding: 

• Nearly all waste operations, including landfills and transfer stations, in the greater Houston area are in communities with more than 50 percent Black and Brown residents. The same goes for illegal dumping. While nearby counties have ordinances for where a landfill can and cannot be placed, Harris County has no such ordinance.
• Landfill space for Houston’s municipal trash will decrease by a third within the next 15 years. A 2021 independent report commissioned by the City of Houston found that Houston needs to begin searching for new landfill space immediately. A new landfill takes 10 to 15 years to permit and build. Five years after this report, the city is still in its planning phase.
• The City of Houston has little say over the operations of privately-owned landfills and how much pollution is emitted or what sustainable methods are incorporated. Regulations are managed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. In Harris County,  78 percent of the methane emissions come from three privately-owned landfills in 2023. Methane gas is a major contributor to climate change.
• Composting – a more sustainable form of waste disposal – could save about 50 percent of the waste from landfills. However, the Houston Waste Management Department has little money to fund such innovation. Experts say a fee for trash collection is highly recommended to fund projects like composting. The City must approve the fee, but no serious action is being taken. 

For the past month, the Houston’s Mayor’s Office declined to make Mayor John Whitmire or Deputy Chief-of-Staff Steven David available for an interview, and the city’s waste management department refused an interview with the interim waste management director,  Larius Hassen, “due to onboarding.” This came after the previous director, Mark Wilfalk, resigned from his post in late March. 

In Harris County, there are two types of landfills: type I and type IV. There are also numerous transfer stations that hold and sort trash. This series focuses on type I landfills, also known as municipal waste landfills.

For Jackson, the most immediate issue is the trash and landfill on her block. Since she moved to this neighborhood a couple of years ago with her children and mother, her asthma and her youngest daughter’s asthma have gotten worse. On particularly stinky days, she feels like she can’t breathe at all. 

Jackson wants to rally the neighborhood, which is why she and her son set out to document and share their daily trash battle. She brings pepper spray with her for stray dogs – which are also dropped off in her neighborhood frequently. She meets one neighbor, Jose Hernandez, who is similarly upset about the trash. 

The portion of his yard closest to the street is littered with trash. 

“You wouldn’t see this in River Oaks or the Heights, you know,” Hernandez said. “It’s always on us.” 

Running out of space

Nearly a decade ago, residents from a community south of Houston in Fort Bend County traveled to Austin to argue the impact that privately-owned landfills have on nearby communities. The residents, who lived in a neighborhood called Shadow Creek Ranch, had been dealing with foul odors emitted from the Republic Services’ Blue Ridge Landfill for several years. 

From 2015 to 2018, residents filed over 4,500 complaints to the TCEQ over the smell. The state agency investigated these complaints and fined the landfill $43,712 for reported violations of excess methane emissions and years of misreported data. The TCEQ also issued a corrective plan to Republic Services.

Smell is one of the most common complaints for communities near landfills, according to experts. 

For nearby communities, landfills can decrease the value of land and pollute the air, land and water – especially if not managed properly by the landfill operator. Leachate, or waste water that is polluted by trash, can contaminate local groundwater, while landfill gas can produce odors throughout the community, even seeping indoors. These odors often smell like rotten eggs or urine, and can cause irritation in the eyes, nose and throat, headaches and breathing difficulties. 

“The landfill gas that leaks out doesn’t just include methane, but also toxic and smog-forming air pollutants,” said Edwin LaMair, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. “For those living nearby, there can be respiratory problems from that odor and the truck traffic that passes through all the time.” 

Landfill gas is roughly 50 percent methane, 50 percent carbon dioxide and a small percentage of other gases, said LaMair. Methane and CO₂ are potent greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Other pollutants include hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds – all of which can cause respiratory issues and other long-term health effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. 

In Austin, residents complained to officials about how the odor aggravated and sickened them, according to the Associated Press at the time. One resident, Dalia Kasseb, testified that the smell would make her children wake up sick and cause them to vomit some nights. Another, Heather Zayas, said the landfill smell would wake her up at night wondering if there had been a gas leak in her house. 

Some residents moved to another neighborhood completely, taking a loss on the house they purchased in Shadow Creek Ranch. 

“It would get so bad in our house, we’d get headache after headache,” one resident said, remembering her time at Shadow Creek. “We filed complaints again and again to the TCEQ and they didn’t do anything for years.” 

In a statement from Republic Services on Blue Ridge, the company said “We take odor concerns seriously and fully adhere to our odor control plan as outlined by the TCEQ. If we receive a complaint, we immediately conduct a thorough investigation to identify the source and implement corrective actions if warranted.”

During this time, residents called for the landfill to be completely shut down. However, officials said that was not an option. Officials were wary of losing landfill space, according to local interviews conducted by Community Impact at the time. Blue Ridge Landfill, the newest in the Houston area, still had about 90 years of capacity left and Houston needed the space, especially with population growth. 

Today, the concern is still pressing. Between Houston’s five municipal waste landfills, remaining capacity for trash will shrink by a third within the next 15 years. By 2045, only Blue Ridge Landfill will remain, according to a 2023 TCEQ report.

The City of Houston contracts two national companies for waste operations in Houston: Republic Services and Waste Management.  There are three landfills in Harris County, one in Fort Bend County and another at the edge of Brazoria County, all of which were issued state permits between 1975 and 1990. 

Harris County is also home to 11 type IV landfills and 11 transfer stations. However, municipal waste landfills, also known as type I landfills, are the most polluting, according to the TCEQ.

The number of landfill years left could decrease, however, without landfill expansion. As more landfills reach capacity, the amount of trash diverted to other landfills will increase. For example, if Blue Ridge is the only remaining landfill in the future, it will have to take in more trash. More trash means less time. 

In 2018, the City of Houston hired consulting engineers to conduct an overview of waste management. The resulting 2021 report found that the city needed to start the process for a new landfill as soon as possible. 

“Currently there is no silver bullet for making waste go away,” the report highlighted. “Technologies continue to evolve to help move toward a future of zero waste, but it is unlikely that during the planning period, the city’s reliance on landfills will come to an end.”

The report emphasized that even under the best of circumstances, securing a new landfill will take between 10 to 15 years to site, permit and construct. 

“The City should continue to monitor landfill capacity in the region. The City should begin the process of identifying potential sites for future disposal facilities and move to permit and construct its own landfill,” the consultants advised. 

In an interview with Houston’s Solid Waste Department Director Mark Wilfalk before he resigned at the end of March this year, he said the city was still in the initial phase. 

“We are considering landfills and alternatives to landfills and what that may look like,” said Wilfalk. “We haven’t gotten deep, deep into the process yet, but we’re on schedule.”

This crossroads for waste isn’t just in Houston. Cities like Minneapolis, Detroit and Baltimore are experiencing similar problems. Some cities are shutting down their old trash incinerators, while others are testing alternatives like waste-to-energy plants and moving toward zero-waste projects. Like the consultants advised, experts in waste management say there is no “silver bullet,” but there are options. 

“It’s all about evaluating,” Wilfalk said. “I’m sure there will be a lot more reports coming out in the future about what is the best for Houston. But that takes time and we have a lot to consider.” 

An unequal problem

A major component to consider is location, according to Wilfalk. Research finds that all across the country, waste operations have disproportionately impacted lower-income communities of color – including in Houston. 

In the late 1970s, the residents of a quiet middle-class East Houston neighborhood began protesting the placement of Whispering Pines, a new landfill, in their community. They didn’t see why the landfill needed to be located only 1700 feet from the local high school – other than the fact the neighborhood was over 80 percent Black. 

Residents sued the landfill company, Southwestern Waste Management Corp, for civil rights violations. While they lost the case, it helped spark a conversation about environmental justice and trash in Houston and across the nation. 

During this time, a young sociology student at Texas Southern University named Robert Bullard began researching waste operations in Houston. He found that landfills and trash incinerators were overwhelmingly placed in predominantly Black neighborhoods as far back as the 1920s. 

Today, the demographics in neighborhoods with landfills persists. Of the 25 landfills and waste transfer stations in Harris County, just one facility – a waste transfer station – is located in a predominantly white neighborhood, according to data from the Harris Galveston Area Council.

“After the lawsuit, the city realized that placing landfills in Black neighborhoods would get resistance, and since landfills are apparently incompatible with white neighborhoods, the city moved the landfills outside the city,” said Bullard, now a professor at Texas Southern University and the founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. “But if you look at the demographics of the landfills outside the city, it’s following the same pattern. What’s happened is the problem has just been transferred elsewhere.” 

He isn’t surprised that the demographics of neighborhoods near landfills haven’t shifted – or that, in the rare cases they have changed, those neighborhoods have become less white: At the McCarty Road Landfill – built in 1975 – the share of white residents decreased from nearly 70 percent of the population in 1980 to less than 2 percent in 2023, according to census data. 

And what the city may have considered largely unpopulated swaths of land in the 1970s and 1980s has now been taken over by urban sprawl. In the 1970s, Houston was 557 square miles. By today, the city has expanded to 665 square miles, according to the City of Houston.

“If you look at residential segregation, housing discrimination and economic mobility of whites versus people of color, it’s far easier for a middle-class white family to move out of an area that’s transitioning to hold a landfill than a middle-class Hispanic or Black family,” Bullard said. 

Wilfalk said that cities like Houston should be more conscious of where to build landfills in relation to disenfranchised communities.

“There’s a lot to consider when siting and permitting a new landfill. It can take 10 to 15 years for something like that,” Wilfalk said. He thinks Houston will be more careful about the demographics of where landfills are built going forward. “There’s a lot more awareness nowadays, so I don’t see Houston going down that road.”

However, the City of Houston does not use zoning – meaning there is little or no planning regulation. While some communities implement deed restrictions, which are private rules that can keep industry and businesses from building in the area, other neighborhoods like East Houston, Sunnyside and Kashmere Garden historically did not have the same power. 

Moreover, there is no city ordinance specifying  where a landfill can or cannot be placed, according to Stuart Mueller, deputy director of Harris County Pollution Control Services. Other counties, like Brazoria and Fort Bend, do have ordinances that restrict where landfills can be – all of which highlight that landfills can impact public health and nearby property values. 

“I’ve been in this business for a long time and every time there’s a proposed landfill, no one wants it in their neighborhood,” said Mueller. “But the process starts with the TCEQ and the company. We don’t really have a say on where they go, who applies.” 

Dumping illegally

Nearly every week, Jackson calls 3-1-1 to complain to the city about new trash on the block. She won’t let her daughters outside alone because of the stray dogs and the smell, which aggravates their breathing. 

Historically, areas with landfills in Houston have also experienced more illegal dumping, according to Bullard. 

“Garbage attracts garbage,” Bullard said. “There’s been a pattern of where the illegal dumping is occurring compared to where the old dumps and landfills were. People don’t want to pay to dump their trash, so they drop the trash off nearby. People will remember a neighborhood as the trash neighborhood.” 

Jackson believes the landfill and the illegal dumping are connected. At one empty lot on the other side of North Green River Drive from the landfill, the trash buildup is concentrated and ever-growing, she says. The lot – owned by McCarty Road Landfill according to county records– has not been cleaned for ages. Trash is strewn about the 130 ft-long property and several unhoused individuals have started to camp out there. The property is not fenced off.

A tree from the empty lot fell onto the house next door during Hurricane Beryl. Damien East, who lives there with his family, said no one has come to clean up the lot or the tree. 

“It’s been like this forever,” he said. “We’ve lived here for decades and it’s only gotten worse.” 

Since no 3-1-1 calls were made about the McCarty Road Landfill property, Tarsha Jackson, Houston city council member for the area around the landfill, was not aware of the dumping or the tree falling. Already, Jackson has two teams of four men going out five days a week to tackle illegal dumping in her district. People caught illegal dumping will be fined $4,000. 

Mary Moreno, Jackson’s chief-of-staff, said it can be hard to address illegal dumping if residents do not put in 3-1-1 calls and Jackson is working to inform residents about the importance of calling 3-1-1. 

“The council member’s district is massive,” Moreno said. “Even with our illegal dumping teams, we can’t catch everything.

Republic Services, which owns McCarty Road Landfill, said via a spokesperson that the company “is working with our county and city partners to develop a plan to safely and efficiently clean up the property, which is currently being illegally occupied.” 

The company also said it has a “long history of partnering with community-focused organizations in Houston,” including supporting Houston Habitat for Humanity in Northeast Houston and a community cleanup event at Brock Park near the landfill this spring.

Still, areas on the Northeast side and Southwest side are plagued with the brunt of illegal dumping, according to data provided by the city. This includes the area around the McCarty Road Landfill near Jackson and the Whispering Pines Landfill, which residents protested back in 1978. 

The communities around Whispering Pines Landfill – East Little York and Homestead – had 227 reports from residents of illegal dumping while the area around McCarty Road had 232 reports from March 31, 2024 to April 1, 2025. During this same time, Houston’s most expensive neighborhood, River Oaks, had six. 

In 2022, Lone Star Legal Aid filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that the City of Houston discriminates against Black and Latino residents in Northeast Houston neighborhoods. The federal government followed this with an investigation. While the investigation did not find any discrimination, the city reached a deal with the justice department in 2023 for a three-year clean-up plan with a $17.8 million budget. 

Council member Jackson knows North Green River Drive is a dirty problem and understands the massive cost both to the city and to the residents. Part of this is due to contractors refusing to pay the fee to dump at a landfill. Another part is the issues the city has picking up trash regularly – which ultimately comes to funding. 

But, the city needs additional resources to make it happen, Jackson said. 

For Wilfalk, Houston needs to put out its current trash fires before even considering the future of its landfills. 

“We’re all aware that we need to fix the system and there are opportunities that exist in the space to tackle it,” Wilfalk said. “There are just so many irons in the fire right now and we need to work on those first.”