Plan to expand landfill scrapped
Carverdale residents, advocates protested proposal as racism
A permit application for the expansion of a landfill in northwest Houston’s majority-Black Carverdale neighborhood was withdrawn Thursday after heavy opposition from area residents and environmental justice advocates.
The Hawthorn Park Landfill, which opened at a modest 10 acres in 1977, is permitted to operate on 171.6 acres. Its nowscrapped plan would have added another 38.6 acres to the site and increased the height of the waste piles.
The site is owned by USA Waste of Texas Landfills, a subsidiary of Houston-headquartered Waste Management, and sits beside Sam Houston Parkway. The company applied for Texas Commission on Environmental Quality permission to expand its operations in 2021.
“When they applied for this permit, they were going to seal off what’s in the ground and build a 20-story mountain of trash, and that would have just been devastating,” said Myra Jefferson, who grew up in Carverdale and remembers the area before the landfill took over.
“There has been a history of sickness and death, (and then there are) the smells, the rats, the roaches, the dust. I mean, I’m constantly trying to keep my house clean,” Jefferson said. She added that “the battle is not over” since the landfill’s owners can apply again.
“USA Waste withdrew the application due to realignment of strategic company priorities. The Hawthorn Park Landfill remains a valuable operating asset and the expansion will be re-evaluated in the future,” the company said in a statement.
Protests and community hearings on the proposed expansion held by the TCEQ have drawn crowds since 2021. Residents were joined by elected leaders, including then-state Sen. John Whitmire and environmental justice scholar Bob Bullard, who called the expansion plan a “classic example” of
environmental racism.
Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University, did his foundational research in the field on how Houston’s landfills were nearly always located in predominantly Black areas.
Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee built these arguments into a petition against the expansion, which his office filed in administrative court in February 2023.
“We don’t get a lot of wins in this space,” Menefee said Thursday. “What my office did was hire experts, review hundreds of thousands of pages, and then do everything we could to persuade Waste Management to do the right thing.”
Whitmire, elected mayor of Houston last month, called the change "something to celebrate" and said he had objected to the landfill’s expansion as state senator, marching alongside residents and business owners.
“This is a great victory for Carverdale,” Whitmire said. “It’s a very proud community, a lot of history there. But then you have open ditches, illegal dumping and this very harmful landfill . ... No one should live under that stress.”
USA Waste filed its withdrawal decision with the administrative court, which has yet to dismiss the case.