The Coffin Butte Landfill, located about 10 miles north of Corvallis, takes in trash from around two dozen Oregon counties and accepts more than a million tons of waste every year. But its shelf life is expiring, and Republic Services, the company that owns and operates the landfill, is trying to expand it.
Last month, Republic won Benton County’s approval for a permit that greenlights the expansion, so long as Republic complies with certain criteria to mitigate the dump’s environmental impact.
Then on Wednesday, Dec. 17, the Benton County Board of Commissioners withdrew its previous approval after opponents appealed the decision to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals, leaving it unclear whether the expansion will ultimately happen.
Mason Leavitt is a geographic information systems analyst and programs manager at Beyond Toxics. He joins us to revisit the expansion’s continuing saga, what we know about the site’s environmental impact and what alternatives there might be.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect the Benton County Board of Commissioners’ December decision.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Coffin Butte Landfill outside Corvallis takes in more than a million tons of waste every year from about two dozen Oregon counties. But it’s running out of room, and Republic Services, the company that owns and operates the landfill, is trying to expand it.
Republic won Benton County’s approval last month for a permit that green lights the expansion, so long as Republic complies with certain criteria to mitigate its environmental impact. Yesterday, the Benton County Board of Commissioners rescinded that decision after opponents appealed at the Land Use Board of Appeals [LUBA].
Republic Services declined to appear on our show. Two Benton County commissioners who initially voted to approve that expansion were not available, but Mason Leavitt is. He’s a geographic information systems analyst and programs manager at Beyond Toxics, which has been fighting this expansion. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Mason Leavitt: Thanks for having me, Dave. Excited to be here.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. So a lot of moving pieces here and things developed even just yesterday. But in the big picture, where is the landfill right now on the path to expansion?
Leavitt: I think they’re well on their way, outside of this LUBA case. Yes, the decision was pulled yesterday. However, the decision can be pulled for a variety of reasons. I think it’s fairly unlikely that the Benton County commissioners are changing their minds and suddenly denying this. They would have to write up a whole different set of findings that refutes their 120-page long argument that the expansion is merited. So not only would they have to find grounds for denial, they would have to refute the argument that they just wrote.
What I think they’re doing is they’re reopening this case so that they can firm up their findings in preparation for that LUBA appeal.
Miller: The two Benton County commissioners who voted initially to approve the expansion, as I noted, couldn’t appear on our show. But they did provide a statement. I want to read part of it:
“The end goal of the board of commissioners is not a bigger landfill. No one wants that. The goal of Benton County commissioners and staff is a regional solid waste solution that can replace the landfill. Benton County has never been the right place for a regional landfill. Two years ago, the county, with resources allocated by the Board of Commissioners, initiated a project to start working toward a real solution. We banded together with partners from the state, six counties and throughout Northwest Oregon to develop and fund a system that will get the active landfill out of our backyard. Until a new system is in place to deal with solid waste in our region in a more sustainable way, the board of commissioners will continue to evaluate each step and decision using the information physically and legally available at the time.”
I have to say I was a little confused by this statement, and the land use approval given this statement. Do you understand how approving an expansion of the landfill will help the county move past this landfill?
Leavitt: I don’t see how this will, at all. This is a perpetuation of the status quo. I think a lot of people have weighed in on this. It’s not moving us towards a more sustainable system. It’s really moving us in a direction that is beneficial to these large out-of-state corporations like Republic Services, whose bottom line is money. They’ve been fighting for this expansion for a little over five years now and the county has had plenty of opportunity to make changes in the meantime.
I like the sound of their statement. I would like for them to do that. However, even looking at their existing record in 2021, they commenced a work group called Benton County Talks Trash. And in that work group there was a lot of discussion in and around the landfill, how it’s operated, how well it’s complied. And that report produced a series of recommendations that the Board of Commissioners moved to adopt, and those recommendations were made available in the end of 2022. And the county did nothing with those recommendations. Instead, we sat on our hands for two years. Republic Services applied for another expansion in 2024 and has been going through that application process since.
I would like to see the county walk the walk of their statement.
Miller: The land use approval that was walked back yesterday, that came just a few days after the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s latest enforcement action at the landfill. What did state inspectors find recently?
Leavitt: So state inspectors uncovered a number of things. I’d like to take a little bit of credit here. Beyond Toxics released a report in February 2025 this year, where we had taken a variety of annual environmental monitoring reports that are submitted by landfill operators, including Republic Services at Coffin Butte, to the Department of Environmental Quality. And in that report, they go over their landfill gas collection system, how well it’s working and the monitoring they are doing to ensure that it is working. And in those reports, we were able to derive a number of serious omissions and flaws in their monitoring system, including exempting up to 92% of their facility from any monitoring – meaning that where there are pockets of landfill gas escaping the facility, Republic Services was choosing not to monitor those areas and citing those areas as exempt, without getting any permission from DEQ.
Despite it going on since 2022, DEQ finally placed some enforcement and said, “Hey, you need to be monitoring your entire facility. You never got approval to not monitor your facility.” And in addition to that, we’ve uncovered a number of serious problems, including their gas collection system being down for extended periods of time … Meaning all of the landfill gas which includes methane, a powerful climate driving gas, as well as a lot of toxic air pollutants was just escaping untreated into the local area and the wider atmosphere, because their system was shut down, and it shouldn’t have been.
So DEQ uncovered a wider variety of violations including not monitoring, shutting down their gas collection system and not taking appropriate actions to repair parts of their system that the operator had reported was not working.
Miller: Republic Services, as I noted, declined to appear on our show, but they did provide this statement:
“Much of the DEQ notice relates to matters that were addressed after inspections in 2022 and 2024. Other matters are in the process of being addressed and we will work closely with DEQ as this work is completed. Coffin Butte Landfill is continually taking action to enhance its operations. We’re diligently monitoring gas well data and making adjustments as needed to optimize gas collection within the system. We’re also testing new technologies, including the use of rovers and drones to determine their effectiveness in enhancing our monitoring capabilities.”
What’s your response?
Leavitt: Republic Services is only doing that work because Beyond Toxics and a lot of organizations, including the local Valley Neighbors for Environmental Quality and Safety, fought to pass Senate Bill 726 earlier this year in the legislative session, which requires Republic Services to do all of the actions it is articulating as voluntarily taking. So I appreciate the candor from Republic Services, but they wouldn’t be doing that had we not passed legislation requiring them to do that. We decided that action was necessary because of the ongoing violations.
So I would like to credit the community with all of the work that went into organizing for that legislative effort. And Republic Services is now having to comply with the new laws that were created because their monitoring was so bad.
Miller: You mentioned the community there. Can you describe what you’ve heard from people who live and work within a few miles of this landfill, what they experience regularly?
Leavitt: One of the testimonies that just always comes back to my mind was this older lady. She had testified in front of the board of commissioners that she loves to go out on runs in and around her neighborhood, which is called the Soap Creek Valley. And quite frequently, especially during the winter, on her runs, she is breathing fresh air, and then suddenly she hits what she describes as a “wall” of landfill gas. [It] is just so nauseating and gross that she has vomited in the past on her runs after hitting that wall of gas, and her system just being shocked by that odor and all of the toxic pollutants that are in that gas. So she has to then turn around, very slowly walk home and take it easy.
And this is just one story. I walked door to door of about 500 homes in Adair Village and 60% of residents reported regularly encountering what they call a “dump day,” when the landfill smells so bad. Then 20% of total residents said that they modify their daily activities in response to a dump day, meaning they don’t go out and garden, they choose not to have friends over at their house because the smell permeates the insides of their walls. They don’t go on a walk, they don’t go walk with their dog, they don’t go on a bike ride because the landfill gas smell is so bad.
Miller: I mentioned that the county commission didn’t give a blanket approval for the expansion in its land use approval that is now rescinded. They made that approval contingent on some mitigation and monitoring. If all of that monitoring and mitigation were put in place, how much would that solve the problems that you’re talking about?
Leavitt: There are some problems with this landfill that are just not possible to solve. The interesting word here is “mitigation.” And actually what those requirements and the conditional use permit do is what I would articulate as “monitoring” for the existence of a problem, rather than mitigating it.
Let’s take litter as a great example. Landfills are obviously full of litter, of lots of different kinds of trash, and plastic bags tend to be one of the hardest types to manage. You can picture lightweight plastic is able to be picked up by the wind and really get anywhere off of the facility. So one of the conditions of approval is requiring two layers of fencing on the landfill operations. And one of the flaws that is immediately obvious with that fencing is, what’s going to stop trash from blowing up right over the fence and getting up over it? Neighbors who live south of the facility, between the landfill and their houses are 50-foot tall fir trees, and they get plastic bags that come up over from the working face all the time or from trucks coming in.
And you might be saying to yourself, “it’s just a couple of plastic bags, what’s the big deal?” The big deal is this area supports a lot of livestock. We heard many testimonies from ranchers in the area who said, “All it takes is one bag to kill one of my cattle. If one bag gets in my pasture and one of my cows eats that bag, it’s over. That cattle is dead. I’m out the money that I would have had, and not to mention the emotional attachment I formed to that animal.”
One of the most heartbreaking testimonies was from a young gal named McKenna Bradley. She talked about the challenges of having to walk each of her cattle through the pasture each day because she can’t let them free roam because of the risk of ingesting these plastic bags. So although this condition of approval says we’re going to put two layers of fencing on, I think one of the commissioners even said you would have to put a dome around this landfill to actually stop plastic bags from escaping. That is not a realistic condition of approval. So instead, they’re going with this two layers of fence options.
There are many other issues including groundwater quality, odor is a big one that we just discussed. Fire risk is another really substantial issue with this facility, due to the flammability of methane. And many of the testimonies raised concerns that the conditions of approval might monitor for the existence of these problems – odor is a really good example. Odor requires that the operator of the landfill go out and do a smell tests to see if the odor exists, and then do anything they can to reduce the odor based on the determination of its cause.
But the county has no ability to independently determine the cause of the odor problem, or independently determine that the odor problem exists. I’ve read dozens of air quality complaints through DEQ. Right now, that’s what Republic Services said as well: “they said they smelled this, but we can’t smell it, so it doesn’t exist and it must not be a problem.” So a lot of the enforceability of these mechanisms is in serious question and we’re talking about residents having to take a multibillion dollar corporation to court to be able to enforce any of these conditions of approval.
Miller: Just briefly, in the minute we have left, what’s your preferred solution for where the trash that’s currently going to Coffin Butte would go?
Leavitt: So let’s say we are going to continue landfilling everything we’re landfilling, which I don’t think we should be doing. If you were to ship that out to a location with a better climate, a better geology and further away from people, you would mitigate an enormous amount of the environmental problems I just articulated. Columbia Ridge has a rail connection to it that I think would be really advisable with some waste transfer stations in the Mid-Willamette Valley.
But realistically, we should be looking at what Lane County is doing with their materials and energy recovery facility, which they call the Clean Lane Project. This facility will sort out and reuse 60% of waste going into the facility and prevent that from ending up in Lane County’s local landfill. So really, other local governments should be looking at solutions like this and implementing these. And private companies are never going to have an interest in this. Republic Services is literally labeled recycling as a threat to its profit margins in its filings to the SEC. We need real strong public government leadership here and we should not be expecting private companies to lead us into a future of more sustainable waste management.
Miller: Mason, thanks very much.
Leavitt: Thank you.
Miller: Mason Leavitt is a geographic information analyst and programs manager at Beyond Toxics.
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