Waste Not, Want Not: Grand Tajiguas Project Turns Proverb into Reality
Making Trash Is Easy; Dealing with It Is Not
By Jean Yamamura | July 29, 2021
The ancient art of alchemy has been revived at the dump where Santa Barbara throws its trash. It’s propelled by a giant maze of conveyor belts that drops big, heavy trash and separates it from smaller, lighter trash and is also brewed in a concrete bunker where 16 heated tunnels take organics from the waste and turn them into black gold, or nutrient-rich compost.
Soon, much of the 200,000 tons that get trucked through the gates at Tajiguas Landfill every year will be converted into the electricity necessary to run the extensive facility with enough left over to power 3,000 homes. And the amount of trash plowed under at the site will be reduced by more than 85 percent.
The landfill, 26 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara, has become the first in California to combine all these beneficial waste-stream elements — a recycling center, an anaerobic digester, and a composting facility — at one site. First dubbed the Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF (pronounced “merf”), it is now known as the ReSource Center.
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