With the Waimānalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill about two years away from its planned closure, a proposed replacement site near Makakilo is no longer on the table.
When the Honolulu City Council passed Bill 23 — a capital improvement budget bill for the 2027 fiscal year — last week, it did not include funding for a planned landfill to be built at Makaiwa Hills. This effectively has killed the project, the City and County’s Department of Environmental Services confirmed to Aloha State Daily.
“Mayor Rick Blangiardi has consistently maintained that he does not support locating another landfill on the west side of Oʻahu and communicated that position to [site owner] Campbell Estates several weeks ago,” an ENV spokesperson told ASD. “ENV and the Blangiardi administration will continue evaluating long-term solid waste disposal options.”
What those options might be is unclear. ENV director Roger Babcock Jr. previously told ASD that the Makaiwa Hills site was the only location on the island where a landfill can be built under current laws: restrictions against building landfills within 10,000 feet of airport runways, within tsunami evacuation zones, on federal lands, over protected aquifers, near schools, hospitals, or residential areas had limited the potential locations for a future landfill to a small area west of Makakilo.
With that location now off the table, the future of waste management on O‘ahu is uncertain. Nonetheless, ENV’s long-term waste disposal plans still require a new municipal landfill.
“While the city continues to pursue waste reduction, recycling, and emerging technologies, a municipal landfill remains a necessary component of Oʻahu's solid waste system, making it essential that a responsible, long-term disposal solution be identified,” the ENV spokesperson told ASD.
The only operational landfill on O‘ahu, the Waimānalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill, can only operate until mid-2028 under its current special use permit. While that permit can be extended, Babcock previously told ASD that, at current waste production rates, the landfill will reach capacity by 2031.
Babcock has suggested that possible options for diverting waste streams from landfills could include recycling ash from the H-POWER trash incinerator — the primary waste deposited at Waimānalo Gulch — into raw materials such as asphalt, which could prolong the operational life of the landfill. Other possibilities include more robust recycling programs, or potentially “mining” the landfill to recycle previously buried waste.
On the other hand, Makakilo Councilwoman Andria Tupola called the council’s decision “a victory for West O‘ahu” last week, saying that “our communities should not be expected to carry another generation of O‘ahu’s waste burden.”
Tupola previously introduced a resolution to the council this year establishing an “End Landfills Task Force” that would identify other long-term waste strategies that don’t rely on landfills. That task force will develop a transition plan for the county by November 2027.
“Until we start turning waste into resources, every landfill is a policy failure,” Tupola said.
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