The World’s Largest Landfill Is Empty

This article is a study of the first waste-by-rail landfill constructed in California. During the late 1980s, as Los Angeles County struggled with what was seen as an impending garbage crisis, waste officials began looking for a means to export household waste out of the county. In response, a company in Imperial County offered to take Los Angeles trash. Its plan involved converting a desert gold mine into the largest landfill in the world. While the garbage crisis prompted the push to build this remote dump beyond urban and suburban centers, economic crises in Imperial moved the landfill through the Imperial County government via the promise of tax revenue, fees, and jobs. Despite the landfill’s construction, however, it sits empty to this day. This article argues that the landfill project was itself part of a growing competition for household garbage in Southern California. As more stakeholders began competing for trash, the garbage destined for Imperial disappeared into the market. Ultimately, this study invokes multiple registers of crisis to show how Californians displaced one crisis regarding landfill capacity onto a neoliberal crisis concerning the state’s political economy. Rather than interpret waste as simply the unwanted externality of capitalism’s daily operations, it suggests that garbage has its own political and economic life, which determines where waste flows in the urban, suburban, and rural landscape.