A sustainable future is possible for Houston—local officials just have li...

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 third in a series of articles examining Houston's mounting trash troubles.

 

It’s been several years since the stench permeated through Shadow Creek Ranch, but Berto Lozano still remembers it like it was yesterday. The smell, from the nearby Blue Ridge Landfill in Fort Bend County, seeped into homes at night, causing respiratory issues and headaches, waking children and alarming families. These days, it’s not nearly as frequent or intense, but some mornings, Lozano still smells that telltale mix of trash and rotten eggs. 

He moved into Shadow Creek Ranch, a neighborhood of newly built single-family homes south of Houston, over a decade ago. Not too long after that, the landfill began emitting a putrid stench. 

“Nearly every day we’d smell it,” Lozano said. “So everyone in the neighborhood started coming together. We signed petitions, we complained to the state. It took forever for anyone to listen.” 

For decades, burying waste in a landfill has been the answer to much of Houston’s trash.  However, over time, concerns over methane pollution and impact on the community has pushed local governments to consider solutions – both at the landfill and as alternatives to the industry. 

In Texas, local officials and communities have little control over privately owned landfills like Blue Ridge. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulates everything, from the initial permitting process to emission standards and compliance. Because of this, experts say that once garbage is trucked to a landfill, what happens inside the landfill is ultimately up to the private operators within state and federal environmental guidelines.

However, local governments do still have some say: Counties and cities can push for up-to-date technologies and more stringent emissions standards, such as incorporating methane reduction strategies; they can also advocate for landfill alternatives, like burning trash, a controversial method that saves space and reduces methane emissions.

Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that effectively traps heat in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. While methane itself is odorless, when it escapes a landfill, it tends to be mixed with other pollutants that emit the same stench Lozano smelled for years. 

But, critics of the current system say issues like this could change. As Houston runs out of landfill space, the city is at a crossroads with its trash. Because of this, environmental advocates see now as the time to push for a future with less methane and more sustainable practices. 

Already, states like Maryland, Oregon and Michigan have implemented plans to reduce methane emissions from waste and states like Maine have moved to alternatives like waste-to-energy facilities. Texas is the nation’s largest emitter of methane, and it’s long been on advocates’ radar. 

“I don’t think anyone woke up and decided this is how we want to design our waste system in this country,” said Katherine Blauvelt, the circular economy director at the national climate nonprofit Industrious Labs. “It’s our responsibility, the responsibility of officials, of the companies, to make things better.” 

Finding local control

For decades, environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn worked in the business of fighting landfills. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, he represented cities that opposed landfill placement and residents who called for cleaner air. 

“To win against a landfill as an opponent, I had to come up with a new concept to win every time,” said Blackburn, now a professor of environmental law at Rice University. “To defeat a landfill, you needed to find a unique issue with that landfill that somehow would discriminate it from the rest of the pack.”

As arguments emerged, the state would respond to each individual issue with a band-aid solution, said Blackburn. That left him needing to think of a new and never-used-before argument again and again. 

This is because, when it comes to landfills, the state’s purpose is to approve and issue permits to operators, according to the TCEQ. Unless a city or county prohibits landfills from being placed in certain areas through an ordinance, this process is beyond the control of local officials. Houston and Harris County have no such ordinances. 

“It’s a conversation between the TCEQ and the landfill,” Blackburn said. “Cities and counties are generally overruled by the state.”

There have been a few hard-won exceptions. 

In the case of Blue Ridge Landfill, after thousands of complaints and public outcry from the City of Pearland, the TCEQ investigated in 2018 and found that the company – Republic Services –  failed to properly maintain its operations, causing higher emissions of methane and other gases, according to agency reports. 

The TCEQ fined Republic Services and instructed the company to fix the issues. 

Since then, the smells have been less intense and less frequent, said Pearland Mayor Kevin Cole. The City of Pearland worked with Shadow Creek Ranch residents to resolve the issues stemming from Blue Ridge Landfill by hosting city council meetings, collaborating directly with Republic Services and working with state representatives. 

“The city got involved, at least to exercise our voice,” Cole said. “While we didn’t really have any power or control as a city, we did have a voice. TCEQ was really slow to respond and we wanted to make sure the residents were being heard.”

Cole said he likes to think of the Blue Ridge Landfill fight as a success story for everyone, including the landfill – which is now a better neighbor to the residents, according to Cole. 

Blauvelt from Industrious Labs also pointed out that landfill companies, like Republic Services and Waste Management, can implement better practices from the start because they can afford to. 

“These are massive companies who are profiting off of putting trash in the ground and it’s costing us, the consumer, the cities, to pay them — and also in health impacts,” Blauvelt said. “We can do better and that’s their responsibility too. It shouldn’t just be on residents.”

Republic Services had a net profit of $2 billion in 2024 for all its national and international operations and Waste Management had $3.2 billion in profit that same year.

One sustainable practice waste operators have started is implementing their own composting systems. Composting is a process that transforms organic waste, such as decomposing plant and food leftovers or yard and tree trimmings, to enriched soil. It diverts organic waste before it enters the landfill, both saving space and reducing methane emissions. 

Republic Services has 12 composting facilities throughout the United States, including a solar-powered composting facility near San Diego, California. Waste Management has four programs in North America that convert food waste into energy. 

In Brazoria County, Waste Management’s Coastal Plains Landfill has a small compost operation that takes yard waste and green waste. It is the only local example. 

In a statement to the Houston Landing, Republic Services said that while the company is continuously evaluating options, there are no immediate plans to add composting to the area. 

“What these big companies can do or not do with waste is something cities like Houston can consider going forward,” Blauvelt said. “When they ink that new contract, the city can say we want to use 21st-century technologies and operations.” 

For the past month, the Houston Mayor’s Office did not respond to repeated requests for comment, 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. 

The business of capturing gas 

One modern solution for landfill gas is capturing it before it even enters the atmosphere. In Harris County,  78 percent of the methane emissions came from three privately owned landfills in 2023, including McCarty Road and Atascocita. 

To combat this, some landfill operators have been converting the methane produced from waste into energy and natural gas. Rather than releasing the gas into the environment, the gas, which is a mix of carbon dioxide and methane, is collected through a network of pipelines installed in the landfill trash. It is then cleaned and reused.  

At the Atascocita Landfill in northern Houston, there are nearly 400 gas collectors throughout the landfill that pump the methane and carbon dioxide to a gas-to-energy facility, which scrubs the gas until it is nearly 100 percent methane then pumps it into the city’s natural gas main lines. 

Collecting gas from landfills to produce energy first emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s, but it increasingly gained popularity in the 1990s as concerns over the environment and climate change grew. Today, there are nearly 600 landfill gas energy projects operating across the United States, with 29 ongoing in Texas, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. 

In the Houston area, four of the five landfills have landfill-to-energy facilities.

Converting collected gas into energy is a completely voluntary EPA program. However, current federal regulations require landfills with a capacity exceeding 2.5 million metric tons of trash– the equivalent of nearly 78,000 large dump trucks – to install a gas collection system. But, those landfills are not required to install the system immediately, according to Edwin LaMair, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“Right now, the federal regulations have a long lead time before the landfill needs to actually put in a gas collection system,” LaMair said. “A lot of methane escapes before the operator has even installed anything.” 

At Blue Ridge Landfill, the company specifically failed to properly maintain and operate the gas collection and control system, causing higher levels of emissions of methane and other gases from the landfill, according to TCEQ reports. In response to these failures, Republic Services implemented a plan to keep the current system operating and expand it as the landfill grows. 

“The moment they got their operations addressed, the smells went away,” Pearland Mayor Cole said. 

However, despite these gas collection and gas-to-energy systems, critics have pointed to methane leaks as another serious problem. As federal regulations stand now, the EPA only requires landfill operators to walk the landfill quarterly to check for leaks. This, Blauvelt from Industrious Labs said, is archaic. 

“Humans are literally walking the ground to find invisible leaks across acres of land,” Blauvelt said. “That system is not working, you know. There are other options.”

Most recently, there has been a push from advocates to fly drones over the landfills to spot leaks. In 2016, the California Air Resources Board flew a NASA drone over the Sunrise Canyon Landfill near Santa Clarita to check for methane leaks as part of an effort to lower the state’s total methane emissions. The drone found numerous leaks, later confirmed by landfill operators. After the company worked to reduce methane emissions, the number of complaints over odor decreased from around 80 in 2016 to 20 in 2018, according to a report on the project. 

In another tracking case, Industrious Labs used satellite data to create a map tracking methane leaks across the United States. An April 2023 satellite image showed 16 plumes of methane at Blue Ridge. Atascocita Landfill had 22 plumes during the same time. A methane plume is a noticeable concentration of methane gas that has been released into the atmosphere. 

None of Houston’s landfills use drones or satellite imagery. However, in a statement, Republic Services said they have several ongoing pilot programs across North America and are actively assessing and testing aerial technology, such as drones, satellites and aircraft, as well as ground-based technology like sensors.  

As of April 2025, the EPA is assessing whether landfill operators should be required to use drones for landfill methane monitoring. The drones, the agency said, “will increase landfill owners’ and operators’ accessibility to real-time data that can be used to address onsite issues quickly and efficiently.” As part of its assessment, the EPA is accepting public comments until May 23, 2025. 

If the EPA passes any kind of requirement for landfill drones, the methane monitoring standard could be updated from the current requirement of walking the landfill just once per quarter, Blauvelt said. 

“It’s up to the EPA to change the rules,” Blauvelt said. “It’s kind of like with EPA’s standards today you are only required to brush your teeth four times a year, but to prevent cavities you have to brush every day.” 

What if we burned all the trash?

But even well-maintained landfills still leave Houston with the problem of running out of landfill space. Before he resigned as Houston’s director of waste operations in March, Mark Wilfalk considered burning trash as a solution to the city’s waste problem. Rather than a trash incinerator, he said he was advocating for a “waste-to-energy system.” 

“Along with some kind of organic disposal program (like composting), I’d like to see a waste energy plant that doesn’t have such high emissions (as a landfill),” he said. “I want to be able to repurpose what we dispose of into energy.” 

Cities across the United States have been burning trash as a solution to growing population and the amount of waste for over a century. All kinds of municipal trash was placed in a system called a trash incinerator and burned into ash. In the 1900s, Houston officials installed several trash incinerators throughout the city, particularly in Black neighborhoods. However, over time, residents and environmental activists in Houston and other cities with incinerators protested burning trash for its harmful pollutants and health impacts. As a result, Houston has no more trash incinerators. 

Waste-to-energy facilities are systems that burn municipal trash, effectively performing the same function as a trash incinerator. However, advocates of these systems say the facilities are far cleaner and more effective than the incinerators in the past – and a better option than a landfill. 

The system also uses the heat generated from burning the waste to produce electricity. In the past decade, these plants have grown in popularity across the world, including in Japan, China and Europe. In Sweden, burning trash supplies heat to millions of apartments and electricity to thousands of homes, according to Avfall Sverige, a Swedish waste management association. Less than 1 percent of Sweden’s trash ends up in landfills. 

Today, there are 75 waste-to-energy facilities in the United States, mainly in the northeast, according to the EPA. In one case, Ecomaine, a facility located in Portland, Maine, processes about 175,000 tons of trash annually to generate 100,000 megawatt-hours of electricity — enough electricity to run 15,000 homes a year. 

“In a perfect future, the first thing we need to have is recycling and composting. And the second thing is waste-to-energy incineration,” said Desirée Plata, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Plata is also the director of MIT's methane network, where researchers study how to reduce methane emissions.

Instead of releasing the methane into the atmosphere like a landfill, waste-to-energy plants burn the methane up and release carbon dioxide. However, the proportionate increase of carbon dioxide is trivial compared to methane emissions, according to Plata. And methane is far more potent as a greenhouse gas in the short term. 

However, environmental advocates have long fought against waste-to-energy facilities, calling them “greenwashed” trash incinerators. They say waste-to-energy facilities are costly and inefficient. A new plant can cost at least $100 million to construct, and they usually function at about 30 percent efficiency. This means only 30 percent of the total energy input – the process of burning the trash – is converted into useful electrical output – useful power and heat – with the remaining 70 percent being wasted. 

In comparison, a natural gas power plant has an efficiency of up to 95 percent. 

Critics have also pointed out that incinerators produce particulate matter—tiny pollutants that can cause lung and heart disease,—as well as heavy metals like lead and mercury and other toxic chemicals, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

Plata has pushed back on this messaging, emphasizing new pollution controls that limit emissions leaking out into the community. 

“There’s a lot of good reasons for the concern,” Plata said. “But modern incinerators are incredibly clean. They are very efficient in scrubbing pollutants out of the smokestack. Almost certainly some emissions will break through the process but, for the most part, they are quite clean.” 

But, Plata agreed that the process can be inefficient. Organic waste, such as food scraps, takes longer to burn because of the high water content. To counteract that, she advocates for incinerators with organic systems, in which operators remove organic waste like food scraps, supercharging efficiency and creating compost. 

To experts like Plata, landfill solutions and alternatives are far from impossible. City officials across the nation are having very similar conversations to Houston and some are making strides in methane reduction and landfill technologies. However, whatever comes next for the fourth largest city is still uncertain. 

But Wilfalk isn’t fatalistic. Even with issues in accessibility and affordability, the same system isn’t inevitable. In Tampa, where Wilfalk worked before moving to Houston, the city had less space for landfills and relied instead on waste energy plants. 

“Houston is big enough that there’s just not going to be one silver bullet to fix everything,” said Wilfalk. “It’s got to be a combination of the most efficient programs to help keep the city clean.”