Most of Butte County’s garbage ends up the Neal Road Landfill in Paradise. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Garbage. It’s not something most of think about once the trash company hauls it away. But it doesn’t mysteriously disappear. Most of us are still living with it in our community, or it’s not too far from us.

For those in Chico, our garbage ends up the Neal Road Landfill in Paradise. This was the site and topic of a recent OLLI class.

The site started in 1965 as a burn dump. Thankfully, we have learned that burning garbage is an environmental disaster. That’s not to say the transition to this 200-acre site being a sanitary landfill in 1970 makes it perfect.

This is one of more than 100 landfills in California.

The pipe carries methane from the dump below to the powerplant on site. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

We are still burying our trash. Every night it’s covered with dirt and a tarp for containment purposes.

About 140 acres are used for trash, while the rest is offices and roads. About 200,000 tons of trash arrive here each year, or about 600 tons a day. Between 1970 and 2023 more than 7.6 million tons of waste have been buried here.

Eric Dugger, a retired site engineer, and Eric Miller, retired solid waste division manager, at the landfill led the discussion and tour of the facility in September.

They said if this landfill, which is owned by Butte County, is managed well, it will have capacity for a few more decades. Expansion is also possible.

“We lost two years of capacity here,” Miller said because this was one of three landfills that took debris from the Camp Fire. “During the peak deliveries of that we peaked at 12,000 tons a day. We peaked at 4,000 vehicles; usual is 400.”

The landfill was also impacted by the 2018 fire that wiped out the town of Paradise. It sustained $2 million in damage.

Scrap metal, bikes, mattresses and other items are diverted from the landfill for recycling. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Heavy equipment operators masterfully move and compact the waste throughout the day. Lines of vehicles—personal and from garbage companies—wait their turn to unload their debris.

Site managers keep certain items, like refrigerators, separate. They can be dismantled with various parts reusable.

Because mattresses, tires and appliances don’t compact, a diversion program is set up for those items.

Completely emptied camper shells, boats, hot tubs—they’ve all found their final resting place in this landfill.

A load of mannequins freaked out some of the workers who didn’t realize what they were at first.

A slew of protocols with redundancies built in are in place to detect any leakage of contaminants into the soil or groundwater.

No matter what they do, they can’t prevent decomposing garbage from creating methane. Not a problem. That gas is now collected and repurposed via the 2.1 megawatt power plant that could be expanded to 4 megawatts.