Wondering Where Waste Went : Sunshine Canyon: The low turnout of trucks on the first day of cutbacks at the brimming landfill leaves its operators puzzled.

Where has all the garbage gone?

That was the question landfill operators were asking themselves Monday, the first day that dumping at the Sunshine Canyon Landfill was scaled back 77% to conserve space at the rapidly filling landfill. Despite the cutback, operators of other landfills reported no appreciable increases in truck traffic at their facilities.

And at Sunshine things were so quiet that operators scratched their heads and wondered where someone might hide more than 2,000 tons of garbage.

Officials at Browning-Ferris Industries, which operates the landfill above Granada Hills, said they were forced to reduce the daily dumping from about 3,000 tons to 700 tons, because Los Angeles officials recently killed a company proposal to expand the facility.

Meanwhile, the company is pushing a separate proposal to expand the landfill in Los Angeles County territory.

Dean Wise, district manager for Browning-Ferris, had feared last week that chaos might erupt Monday morning as haulers competed for the right to deposit trash at Sunshine Canyon. Wise envisioned long lines outside the dump on San Fernando Road shortly after the gates opened at 6 a.m.

It didn’t work out that way. And Wise was at a loss to explain why.

Before Browning-Ferris announced the cutbacks Sept. 13, the dump typically received about 1,000 tons of refuse by 8:30 a.m. each day. But by 9:30 a.m. Monday, said a clearly surprised Wise, only 600 tons had been left at the landfill.

Warning letters sent to the landfill’s regular customers apparently worked. “I think we scared everyone off,” he said.

Truck traffic remained light all day, and Wise closed Sunshine Canyon shortly before 2 p.m. after receiving 900 tons of garbage, slightly more than the 700 tons he had planned. Wise said the tonnage levels may fluctuate until his staff adjusts to the cutbacks.

In previous years, Sunshine Canyon had remained open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. For the first time, following the 2 p.m. closure, work crews posted yellow flags at the gate and near freeway off-ramps as a sign to customers, ranging from municipalities to private companies, that the dump was closed. BFI is routing its own trucks to a landfill in Azusa, but its trucks account for only 8% of the total amount of garbage dumped in Sunshine Canyon, Wise said.

Officials at the three landfills closest to Sunshine Canyon--Calabasas, Chiquita Canyon and Bradley--said they had expected to see extra trash trucks backed up at their facilities. But nothing unusual happened.

“We haven’t seen anything today,” said Bob Asgian, site engineer at the Calabasas landfill.

“I think it is too early to tell,” said Paula Becker, spokeswoman for the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley, of the cutbacks’ impact. The Bradley Landfill, which receives between 2,000 and 3,000 tons a day, had been prepared to accept extra trash, she said.

But Becker, Asgian and other landfill officials agreed that the cutbacks at Sunshine Canyon eventually would start a domino effect that will influence the practices and perhaps prices of municipal and private trash haulers searching for a place to dump their loads. Already the city of Santa Monica has diverted some of its trash trucks from Sunshine Canyon to the other Browning-Ferris dump in far-off Azusa.

County sanitation officials and landfill operators said they are cautiously watching to see how the scaled down operations at Sunshine Canyon will affect the industry. The uneventful turnout Monday may have been an anomaly, said Nazareth Chabonian, owner of Blue Barrel Disposal in Santa Clarita.

“The trash is going somewhere,” he said.