A landfill that stopped taking trash back in 2009 continues to generate leachate, and Austin city crews currently haul it away by truck. On Thursday, the Austin City Council is set to consider a contract worth up to $1,270,436 with Cedar Hill Construction that would finally connect the site's leachate holding tanks directly to the sewer system, ending a manual process officials say is straining an aging operation.
The project would install a permanent pipe conveyance system connecting the leachate holding tanks directly to the wastewater line, according to city documents reviewed by the Zero Waste Advisory Commission. The contract breaks down to $1,154,941 in base costs plus a $115,495 contingency, for a total not to exceed $1,270,436. City staff say the full amount is available in Austin Resource Recovery's Capital Budget. As KXAN first reported, the council is scheduled to both consider and vote on the deal Thursday.
The site sits at 10108 FM 812 in southeast Austin, a nearly 400-acre former landfill that stopped accepting waste around 2009 and has been under post-closure management ever since, per KXAN's reporting. Even though no new trash arrives, the landfill continues to generate leachate — the liquid that forms when rainfall or other moisture percolates through buried waste. Landfill lines and pumps extract that leachate into holding tanks, including one, Tank A, that can hold up to 10,000 gallons, according to KXAN.
Why the Truck-and-Tank System Is Wearing Thin
Right now, Austin Resource Recovery pumps leachate into holding tanks and then manually transfers it into tanker trucks bound for an approved disposal location, per the city document filed with the Zero Waste Advisory Commission. City staff describe that setup bluntly: the existing process is labor-intensive, operationally inefficient, and vulnerable to service disruptions during significant rainfall events. If crews can't empty the tanks fast enough, elevated levels can impair pump operations and raise operational risk, the same filing notes.
Christine Whitney, a project manager with Austin Resource Recovery, told KXAN that crew retirement contributed to the push for change, and that the new pipe system would make leachate handling automatic. City staff separately wrote that a permanent pipeline would eliminate the ongoing manual pumping and tanker truck transport operations, improve operational reliability, and reduce staffing demands tied to routine leachate handling.
Beyond the two holding tanks slated for connection, the scope includes pumps, water meters, and a dual-contained HDPE pipeline tying into the city's sanitary sewer manhole on the property, according to a project listing on HigherGov. That mirrors a broader industry shift: at the Landfill of North Iowa, a force main built to Mason City's sanitary sewer system now saves an average of roughly $1,000 a day compared with trucking leachate offsite, and cuts an estimated 37 tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, per a project summary from Foth. That Iowa landfill had been generating an average of 3.4 million gallons of leachate a year and spending $300,000 to $500,000 managing it before the switch.
What's Actually in ‘Trash Juice’
What leachate contains — and how dangerous it is — depends heavily on the waste that mixed with the water in the first place, whether that's chemical, salt, or pharmaceutical waste, per KXAN's reporting. A 2024 study in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that leachate leaking into groundwater can be linked to neurological, respiratory and gastrointestinal disorders, though proper waste management can prevent those adverse effects, KXAN noted.
Whitney told the station she is unaware of any hazardous waste at FM 812 that could have affected its leachate, and said the site's leachate is not contaminated in general. FM 812's leachate samples are tested regularly in a lab and reportedly show little cause for concern, according to Whitney. Navid Saleh, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told KXAN that inactive landfills like FM 812 are generally less exposed to what he called a broader leachate crisis, one that a 2025 Minetek insight attributed to rising temperatures and growing landfill sites; higher temperatures tend to generate more volatile compounds in leachate, per that same reporting.
That crisis is playing out elsewhere with real financial stakes. At a Florida landfill, hauling and disposal costs jumped from just over three cents a gallon to almost 16 cents a gallon after a municipal treatment plant stopped accepting leachate, according to SCS Engineers. During wet months, that facility could spend more than $24,000 a day on leachate disposal at the increased rate. SCS Engineers also notes that landfill operators nationally face mounting compliance pressure as regulators expand the list of wastewater constituents they track, including PFAS and microplastics.
In Oregon, the city of Salem is weighing whether to roughly double the leachate it accepts from Coffin Butte Landfill, to about 40 million gallons a year, with PFAS also reported in the leachate, according to the Statesman Journal.
Council Vote Looms as District Representative Stays Quiet
Austin City Council Member Vanessa Fuentes represents the district that includes the FM 812 site, but she was unavailable for comment when KXAN reached out for this story. The council is expected to both take up and vote on the Cedar Hill Construction contract Thursday. Meanwhile, Whitney advises residents to take hazardous waste to facilities equipped to handle it.
