Every day, Americans dump tons of food — an estimated 170,000 tons, according to the Environmental Protection Agency — into landfills across the nation: carrots gone slimy in the back of a fridge, half-eaten lunch buffets, stale bread, freezer-burned meat, expired cheese. All this is heaped in with plastics, old electronics, worn-out couches and everything else that ends up in dumps, compressed, and, soon enough, buried under the next day’s trash. Entombed in an oxygenless mound of garbage, this food — along with other organic material, including paper, wood and yard trimmings — slowly decomposes, producing methane.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that, in the short term, traps heat at 80 times the rate of carbon dioxide. And dumps are the nation’s third-largest industrial source of it. In 2022, the climate impact of reported methane emissions from landfills across the country was equivalent to running 74 coal-fired power plants for a year. That’s a lot of methane, but the true amount is in fact much higher.
State and federal regulations require landfill operators to install gas-collection systems, monitor regularly for escaping methane and fix any significant leaks. The standard monitoring method consists of a technician walking the dump’s surface with a handheld methane detector, skipping any areas deemed too dangerous — sometimes more than 70% of the landfill. This method, prone to error and incomplete by design, chronically fails to locate leaks.
That’s unfortunate, because finding, fixing and preventing landfill gas leaks offers one of the most significant and achievable opportunities to address climate change in the United States.
IN JUNE, OREGON LAWMAKERS passed new legislation designed to ensure better detection of landfill methane leaks. Senate Bill 726 requires the state’s second-largest dump, Republic Services’ Coffin Butte Landfill, to modernize monitoring practices by incorporating advanced technologies, such as drone, satellite and aircraft sensors, to locate — and, presumably, fix — methane leaks.
The bill, which will take effect in 2027, was introduced by state Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, who represents the communities surrounding the Coffin Butte Landfill in Benton County. Gelser Blouin introduced the bill after a group of local residents who were fighting to stop the landfill’s expansion took her to a knoll overlooking its working face. There, she watched truck after truck unload garbage while the residents shared their unease about Coffin Butte’s impacts on public and environmental health.
As I reported in a June 2025 HCN feature story, they had many concerns. High on the list were the large and persistent plumes of methane leaking from the dump. These leaks violated the Clean Air Act, but regulatory loopholes and ineffective monitoring practices allowed them to continue unmitigated. The plumes not only accelerate climate change; they also pose local health risks. When methane escapes from a landfill, so, too, do other harmful gases, including PFAS, VOCs and hazardous air pollutants.
At Coffin Butte, two EPA inspections and several aerial surveys conducted by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper have consistently found dozens of large leaks — many of them more than 20 times higher than the federal limit — undetected by Republic Services’ manual surveys. Frustrated by the gross discrepancies between the landfill operator’s reported emissions and the levels the EPA and Carbon Mapper were finding, community members asked Gelser Blouin if the state Legislature could address this problem. “They said, ‘What we really need is better data,’” Gelser Blouin told me recently, a request she found very reasonable. The activists weren’t asking to change the methane emission standards, only to improve monitoring and reporting procedures to ensure that the landfill met its obligation to control dangerous emissions. “It just seemed like common sense to want good, high-quality accessible data,” she said.
In recent years, Coffin Butte has become something of a poster child for the problem of unchecked landfill emissions, largely due to the dogged organizing of local activists, who achieved a significant victory on July 29, when the Benton County Planning Commission unanimously denied Republic Services’ application to expand the dump. But the problem isn’t unique to Coffin Butte: In 2024, scientists from the EPA and Carbon Mapper conducted comprehensive aerial surveys of hundreds of U.S. landfills and found that emission rates were, on average, 40% higher than the landfills had reported. That same year, the EPA issued an alert after three years of inspection data revealed that many landfill operators around the nation were violating Clean Air Act regulations. “Study after study is showing (landfill operators) are missing large emissions, and we’re all paying the price,” said Katherine Blauvelt, circular economy director for the nonprofit Industrious Labs.
THE NEW LAW was originally drafted to apply to all of Oregon. During the legislative process, however, waste-management industry leaders, and local governments fearing waste-disposal rate hikes, pushed back. The bill was eventually amended to apply exclusively to Benton County — an outlier among local governments in its support for the bill — thus targeting only the Coffin Butte Landfill.
Many local activists who hoped to benefit all Oregonians living near landfills were disappointed: Even though the new legislation has the potential to benefit people far and wide by reducing Coffin Butte’s climate impact, it fails to protect other frontline communities from landfill gas. Republic Services also disagrees with the bill’s regional focus. “We believe all landfills in the state of Oregon should be held to the same regulatory standards,” Melissa Quillard, the company’s communications manager, told me.
“In SB 726, I see the future arriving.”
Still, despite the bill’s limitations, community members view the new law as a positive first step in a greater reckoning with the waste-management system. “In SB 726, I see the future arriving,” said Ken Eklund, who has spent years working to expose Coffin Butte’s methane problems. Better monitoring is sorely needed, but keeping organic matter out of dumps in the first place — particularly food waste, which contributes most to methane production and could be composted instead — is essential to reducing landfill emissions. Eklund believes that more transparency around just how much methane is leaking from dumps will help galvanize efforts to implement alternatives to landfills.
With the Trump administration aiming to weaken federal greenhouse gas reporting and monitoring programs, state and regional action will be crucial to tackling landfill methane. “We have an opportunity now to lead the way,” said Gelser Blouin, who hopes the new law will serve as a pilot. Colorado and California, among other states, are pursuing legislation to improve methane monitoring, and some landfill operators around the country have begun doing so voluntarily. “People are realizing we have a problem that’s really serious,” Blauvelt said, “and there’s technology that can help us solve it.”
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