Air quality report finds three landfills make up nearly all methane emissions in Harris County

About 30 miles northeast of downtown Houston, towering hills of green loom over the community of Atascocita. Some nearly 200 feet tall, the hills can be seen from the main road, the area’s sport complex and the surrounding neighborhoods. All seems typical, except for a slight sour smell that wafts through the community – especially after it rains, residents say.

This is because the hills aren’t natural. They are trash. Stretched across 800 acres, the Waste Management Atascocita Recycling and Disposal Facility is a municipal solid waste landfill, processing over a million tons of waste a year – 17 percent of the total waste in the Houston area between 2010 to 2018.

The Atascocita landfill is also the highest contributor of methane emissions in Harris County, according to a report published Tuesday by the environmental nonprofit, Air Alliance Houston. Atascocita, along with McCarty Road Landfill in northeast Harris County and the Baytown Landfill, make up for 78 percent of the total methane emissions – a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.

The report, titled the Dirty Dozen, identified the top 12 facilities responsible for “chemical releases and climate-warming pollution” in the Houston area after analyzing five datasets from both the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency. Atascocita and McCarty make the list.

“When you’re thinking about fighting climate change, you think of industry, but you don’t always realize the waste problem here in the United States,” said Inyang Uwak, research and policy director for Air Alliance Houston. “How we manage our municipal waste plays a huge role in contributing to climate change.”

At the same time, the Biden-Harris administration announced last week that the EPA will be issuing a proposed rule updating air emissions standards for municipal solid waste landfills in 2025. Landfills are the third largest contributor to methane emissions in the United States.

As organic waste deteriorates over time in open-air conditions, it produces methane gas. The methane travels up into the atmosphere, trapping heat at 28 times the potency of carbon dioxide. Because of this, the gas is responsible for 30 percent of the global temperature rise since the industrial revolution.

“This is a problem we can fix,” Uwak said. “We just need to think of more innovative ways to limit or manage our waste.”

Community Impact

At a Tuesday morning press conference, environmental advocates and officials met at a skatepark in Baytown to discuss the report. Just across the street is Exonn’s Baytown refinery, puffing clouds into the air as industry trucks pass by.

“Curtailing air pollution has never been more urgent as storms like the derecho and Hurricane Beryl barrel through our neighborhoods in ways we’ve never seen before due to the impacts of climate change,” said Jennifer Hadayia, executive director for Air Alliance Houston, at the conference. “We know what pollutes the air also warms the climate.”

These pollutants include nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide from chemical plants, like Exonn, and methane from chemical plants and landfills.

The City of Houston generates about 4.2 million tons of municipal solid waste each year and is expected to increase to 5.4 million tons by 2040, according to Houston’s Solid Waste Management Department. The Atascocita landfill will reach waste capacity in 17 years. McCarty has less: 9 years. At capacity, the landfills will shut down.

For decades, environmental justice advocates have raised alarms about the disproportionate impact of landfills on Houston’s Black and brown communities. Eleven of the 13 city-owned landfills and incinerators were built in primarily Black neighborhoods, according to research conducted in 2014 by Robert Bullard, founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice in Houston. Atascocita and McCarty are overwhelmingly minority.

“When you look at the environmental justice lens, we are looking at methane, but we’re also looking at the other negative impacts of having these facilities near communities of color,” Bullard said. “It can attract illegal dumping, it can lower property values. That’s that hidden cost of the legacy of where these landfills are located.”

There can be health implications as well. Landfill gasses, such as methane, can move through the air into nearby buildings – causing coughing, nausea, throat irritation and headaches, among other issues, said Kevin Lanza, assistant professor of environmental sciences with UTHealth Houston. Leaks from landfills, called leachate, can damage local ecosystems with high levels of ammonia.

And diesel trucks moving to and from the landfill can pollute air quality.

“It’s not just about the given activity, the landfill, but it’s also about all the infrastructure in the system at large,” Lanza said. “We know that these internal combustion engine vehicles are emitting this mix of different chemical pollutants and particulate pollutants. So it may not just be the site, but the mobile sources as well.”

In a statement from Waste Management of Texas, the company said that “ reducing climate impact and greenhouse gas emissions is a top priority.” They are committed to reducing indirect and direct greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2031 and plan to have a methane measurement system by 2025.

In 2022, the company said they reduced direct and indirect emissions by 10 percent from the previous year.

In Texas, the county and the city are limited in what actions they can take with regards to methane emissions, said Harris County attorney Christian Menefee.

“We do not have a lot of power,” said Menefee, after the conference. “There is no blueprint because the law doesn’t give us clean authority in many instances. So we do the best we can to find creative ways through federal law or some arcane state law. But the quickest way to solve these issues is for the TCEQ to just do its job.”

The announcement about a new EPA ruling gives Bullard some hope, however. In 2021, the Biden-Harris Administration finally began implementing the 2016 Clean Air Act rule, which tightened emissions guidelines for new and existing landfills. The Trump administration had put the new regulations on hold.

Now, the EPA will release a new ruling in 2025 – which could strengthen the emissions guidelines even further and incorporate new technologies to better measure and address emissions. One technology can capture methane and use it for clean, green energy for electricity or heat.

“It’s a very good start and it has potential for change in terms of policy at the federal level,” Bullard said. “So when we talk about enforcement, we talk about monitoring, we talk about ensuring (landfill) permits granted at the state level, that the federal government enforce these regulations across the board and not look the other way.”