Click here if you are having trouble viewing the photo gallery or video on your mobile device.
SANTA CRUZ — The sun had just risen, but its warm rays hadn’t yet crept into the bottom of the canyon. The air was crisp and clean. Birds rustled in the trees and brush around the pond in the canyon’s depths.
Red-winged blackbirds, flickers and oak titmice called from the treetops in a chatter of pert chirps and low whistles. Birdwatcher Lisa Larson pointed her binoculars at a stir in the trees — a white-throated sparrow, her first of the season.
It’s an unexpectedly pastoral scene for a city dump — one that exemplifies how landfills can be transformed into fertile homes for wildlife.
The Santa Cruz Resource Recovery Facility, which also includes a bustling recycling center, is tucked away 3 miles from Highway 1, just north of the city limits. On the horizon, beyond the trucks pouring garbage into a large dirt pit, stretches the vast blue ocean. Between rolling hills made from buried refuse, shaded ponds and copses of trees live countless animal species.
“It’s real pretty down here,” said Kip Conover, the landfill’s site supervisor, gesturing at the canyon between the artificial hills. “It’s one of my favorite spots.”
Santa Cruz isn’t the only city turning landfill sites into homes for animals. Elsewhere in Northern California, the Kirby Canyon Recycling and Disposal Facility in Morgan Hill preserves one of the Bay Area’s few remaining plots of serpentine soil grassland, which supports the threatened Bay checkerspot butterfly. In Livermore, the Altamont Landfill and Resource Recovery Facility’s grassy hills are home to both the endangered San Joaquin kit fox and an active wind-energy farm.
Larson, a Capitola resident and member of the Santa Cruz Bird Club, is a seasoned birdwatcher, having seen 300 different species in Santa Cruz County. She had never been birding at the Santa Cruz landfill before this chilly November morning and was eager to begin her day with her eyes glued to her binoculars and her ears open for bird calls.
“It’s birdy down here,” said Larson, a tech industry retiree.
Over the course of the morning, she heard or spotted more than two dozen avian species.
Most were in the vegetation on the hills or at the base of the canyons — a ruby-crowned kinglet that darted from its perch to snatch an insect from the air, a California quail warbling from the grasses on the hill, a mourning dove cooing from branches overhead.
Garbage and cover
For decades, the city landfill has been burying trash and smoothing it over into gentle, rolling hills with natural vegetation. To make a hill, landfill workers cover several years’ worth of trash with dirt and ground-up construction debris and seal it with clay. They then pile mulch made from green waste — wood chips, fallen leaves and pruned tree branches — onto the clay and throw handfuls of seed over the new hill.
The landscaping work isn’t just for looks. The burying and sealing process is vital to storing trash in an environmentally friendly way. Decaying trash produces methane, a smelly greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. And the gases can seep out of the buried garbage if the landfill isn’t properly sealed.
Landfill transformation is an increasingly common practice, said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, a Sacramento-based environmental group. Because buried waste breaks down over time, it’s impractical to construct buildings on it. But the dumps can often be converted into parks and golf courses.
In the nation’s biggest such project on New York’s Staten Island, the 2,000-acre Fresh Kills Landfill is now going through a decades-long rebirth as Freshkills Park.
Some birds at the Santa Cruz landfill are drawn to the trash, not the beautiful new landscaping. During Larson’s visit, flocks of western gulls, California gulls and endangered tri-colored blackbirds fluttered around a dump truck as it spilled riffraff into an open pit.
A serious problem
This might be a treat for birdwatchers. But attracting gulls to the trash is a serious problem.
In 2013, Ann-Marie Osterback, a fisheries ecologist and former UC Santa Cruz graduate student, found that nearly 30 percent of the salmon traveling through Santa Cruz County’s creeks were getting gobbled up by gulls that had come to the dump for food scraps and stayed for fresh fish.
Aided by feasts of human trash, gulls have grown in number and aren’t in balance with the fish that are their natural food source.
“It’s a bit of a numbers game,” Osterback said. “Even if there are a few more gulls or they eat a little bit more fish, that can have a big impact on the threatened and endangered native fishes.”
Still, the landfill isn’t as overrun with gulls now as it was decades ago. In recent years, diligently covering the dumped garbage every night has made a big difference.
According to former Santa Cruz Mayor Mike Rotkin, who served on the City Council on and off from 1979 to 2010, the city has made significant steps toward a more environmentally friendly and sustainable landfill. When Rotkin was first elected to the council, he was told the landfill site had only 17 years of trash-filling capacity left.
Since then, major changes to recycling programs and industrial waste management in the city slowed the dump’s fill rate. Craig Pearson, the city’s superintendent of waste disposal, estimates the landfill could last another 45 years or so.
“It’s been a strong environmental program,” said Rotkin, who noted that changes in the city’s management of industrial waste and sewage also cut down on pollution from the landfill that used to run off into the ocean.
As Conover pointed at a bucolic hillside, he couldn’t help but smile and agree.
“It’s all garbage under here,” he said, but “it’s more than meets the eye.”
