Municipal Solid Waste Landfilling

Landfills in the United States are taking in more tonnage even as the number of operating sites falls, according to preliminary research from the Environmental Research & Education Foundation presented at RCon in St. Louis.

Suzie Boxman, senior director of programs at EREF, hosted a panel outlining where municipal waste and recycling streams were sent in 2023. The survey used a bottom-up method, building estimates from tonnages reported by individual facilities, regional bodies and state agencies, rather than deriving them from waste generation figures as the federal approach has done. Despite the methodological difference, EREF says its findings broadly track the trends in existing federal data.

Landfilling Remains the Main Pathway

The headline numbers are preliminary but clear. The volume of municipal solid waste managed nationally rose about 10 per cent between 2010 and 2023, equivalent to a 3 per cent increase in the per capita disposal rate.

Landfills took a growing share of that larger total, rising from 67 per cent of MSW in 2016 to 71 per cent in 2023. Over the same period, the share handled by waste-to-energy facilities fell from 8 per cent to 6 per cent, reflecting plant closures over the past decade. Recycling slipped from 19 per cent to 17 per cent, a decline EREF partly attributes to the period covering China’s import restrictions.

Composting tonnages grew modestly. Anaerobic digestion tonnage rose sharply in relative terms but still manages only around 1 per cent of all municipal solid waste handled in the country.

Fewer Sites, Bigger Sites

A separate finalised EREF report counted 1,412 active landfills in 2025, down roughly 10 per cent from 2010. The split between public and private ownership has barely moved over fifteen years, with private operators holding about 35 per cent of sites, although private landfills handle a growing share of total landfilled tonnage because of their larger permitted capacities and wider service areas.

Consolidation into fewer, larger sites has consequences. Haulers face longer distances to disposal, and the report warns that a shrinking facility count places greater operational and regulatory weight on the infrastructure that remains. Where disposal capacity is already constrained by permitting difficulty, every remaining site matters more.

That is the context in which diversion stops being an environmental preference and becomes a capacity question. Every tonne converted to energy, fuel or recovered material is a tonne that does not need airspace in a shrinking national pool, and the economics of recovery improve as the alternative gets scarcer and the haul to it gets longer.

Replace Landfill Capacity with Recovery Capacity

When disposal capacity shrinks and tonnage rises, the gap has to be closed by something other than another landfill cell. Klean Industries delivers waste-to-energy, gasification and resource recovery plants on a KBR turnkey basis, performance-guaranteed and 100% bankable, so the municipality or developer is not carrying the technology risk.

That guarantee is backed by operating references at commercial scale, including a commercial recovered carbon black plant in Poland alongside solid waste and resource recovery facilities delivered internationally. For a council or a private operator facing a permitting fight over the next landfill expansion, a referenced alternative is worth more than a brochure.

There are two ways in. License the technology and develop the facility yourself, or have Klean and KBR build it turnkey against a guaranteed performance envelope. We will run the feasibility work first so the decision rests on your own tonnage and your own economics.

Contact Klean Industries » GO.

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