The Puente Hills Landfill Today

The roughly 1,300-acre Puente Hills Landfill site is located along the southern edge of the San Gabriel Valley, just southeast of the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area (close to the 60/605 Freeways interchange). Rio Hondo College and Rose Hills Memorial Park (the largest cemetery in North America) are adjacent, immediately south of the landfill site.

The Puente Hills Landfill was the second largest landfill in the United States. It operated from 1957 to 2013 and is storing 150 million tons of garbage. But Streetsblog didn’t smell or see any walking around the site last week. The top layer of soil is seven to fourteen feet deep, and the L.A. County Sanitation District remains on site to monitor for any issues, including any cracks that would need to be capped.

Much of the present landfill site is vegetated terraced slopes, which the Sanitation District irrigates to keep the top layer intact.

There are also lots of surface clues as to what is beneath.

There are extensive irrigation pipes and concrete drainage channels. Many of the repeatedly repaired paved roads are bumpy and uneven due to settling ground. There is also a nearly ubiquitous system of large pipes that collect off-gassing methane, feeding it to a small power plant onsite, where it is converted to energy.

Located just inside the Crossroads Parkway entrance will be a new ~15,000-square-foot building housing the park's Environmental Justice Center which will serve as a Visitors Center.

The EJ Center will feature classrooms, a maker space, raptor rescue, solar panels, rotating exhibits, and a podcast studio. Permanent displays will educate visitors on community advocacy, the waste stream, and redlining.

The EJ Center location, called the Entry Plaza, is an existing non-fill area that is already paved and previously served as a weigh station for trucks.

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