BFI Predicts Summer Reopening of Landfill : Garbage: The trash giant plans a $20-million expansion of the Sunshine Canyon dump in Sylmar. The site could generate $38 million a year in revenue.

Opponents invoked everything from ancient oaks to earthquakes to keep the garbage giant Browning-Ferris Industries from expanding its dump in Sunshine Canyon. But today, after 11 years of battling, BFI says its victory is close enough to smell.

The Houston-based company predicts that the first load of trash will be tipped into a newly expanded and reopened landfill this summer, owing in part to a court decision in the company’s favor last year. Besides shutting the book on 40,000 pages of legal documents, opening the Sylmar landfill would give BFI an important toehold in L.A.’s cutthroat market for stashing trash.

Once the landfill is open, Sunshine Canyon could generate $38 million per year in revenue from “tipping fees,” industry jargon for the cost of dumping trash into the pit. Plus, Sunshine Canyon would be one of the few major private landfills near L.A.’s urban center that is not threatened with closure in the next few years--quite a prize considering that the city’s main dump site is nearly full.

But whether Sunshine Canyon will guarantee BFI a long-term edge in the market is unclear. Several rivals are plotting to build enormous dumps in remote desert areas that would dwarf Sunshine Canyon, and are trying to convince public officials that shipping garbage by train to the desert is more palatable than urban landfills.

For now, though, opening Sunshine Canyon would be a triumph for BFI. While BFI is the nation’s second-largest garbage company with 1994 sales of $4.3 billion, the company’s grip on the L.A. market has been slipping in recent years. Although BFI operates a range of services here, including portable toilets and medical-waste disposal, it owns only two of the dozen major landfills now open in the Los Angeles area.

Sunshine Canyon Landfill was closed by the city in 1991 when its permit expired, leaving BFI fighting ever since to reopen it. And BFI’s Azusa landfill is under pressure from a local water board to close, and can take in only about one-third the amount of waste per day as is expected to go into Sunshine Canyon.

So it’s no wonder that reopening Sunshine Canyon “has been an area of intense focus” for BFI, said Marc Chelemer, an analyst with New York investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Inc. who has followed BFI.

BFI first began trying to expand Sunshine Canyon in the mid-’80s. The company had purchased the dump almost a decade before, as well as a large chunk of land that extends beyond L.A. city limits into unincorporated Los Angeles County. When the city closed the dump in 1991, the county--anxious for new dump space--allowed BFI to expand on the countyside of the canyon. The county imposed a host of strict conditions on BFI. But the city and a residential group called the North Valley Coalition of Concerned Citizens sued anyway, alleging that environmental studies allowing the project were flawed.

Finally, last August, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge cleared the way for the expansion, ruling that the dump proposal was in compliance with state laws. Shortly after, the Los Angeles City Council dropped its objections to the landfill, signing an out-of-court settlement with BFI that was made final in October, said Arnie Berghoff, local spokesman for BFI.

Now the company says only bad weather could seriously delay the $20-million construction of a new pit in Sunshine Canyon. The expanded landfill will provide enough space for close to a decade of operation, said Mark Saleski, vice president of BFI’s Southern California division in Sun Valley.

The Sunshine Canyon breakthrough comes just as the landfill business nationally is rebounding from a slump because of flat dumping fees. Garbage volumes dwindled during the recession, in part because of the nation’s enthusiastic embrace of recycling. In L.A. County, for example, total trash volume today is 20% lower than five years ago, said Mike Mohajer, an official with Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Works.

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At the same time, a nationwide trend toward consolidation swept the $30-billion-a-year garbage-disposal industry: “There’s going to be fewer and fewer landfills. But they are going to be much larger,” said BFI’s Saleski. That caused a glut of landfill space in the meantime though, as the construction of huge mega-pits overlapped with the closure of small urban dumps.

BFI may be close to final legal victory in Sunshine Canyon, but the battles are not quite over. Despite setbacks, the North Valley Coalition is still doggedly fighting the Sunshine Canyon project.

Spurned by the courts and abandoned by the city, the group is now attacking the fine details of the design permits BFI still needs. The group recently persuaded water-quality officials to do an additional review of the pit’s synthetic liner due to seismic questions, said Rod Nelson, an official with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. The coalition also has two court appeals pending in Los Angeles County, and one in a state appellate court in Sacramento, said Tony Rossmann, attorney for the homeowners group.

And competition in the local garbage industry is intensifying because Los Angeles is turning to large, private companies to provide long-term replacements for the area’s dozen or so dumps, many of which are filling up. At stake is the future of about 1 million tons per year of garbage generated by the city of Los Angeles--a place that produces more garbage than any other city in the country except New York.

The city’s main dump in Lopez Canyon in Lake View Terrace faces closure when its permit expires next year, said Drew Sones, assistant director for solid resources with Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation. Moves to extend its life by five years have met with opposition.

Several private landfills used by the city are also in peril, said Mohajer, the L.A. County official. These include Chiquita Canyon Landfill in Santa Clarita, owned by Laidlaw Waste Management Inc., which faces an expired permit in 1997, and Torrance-based BKK Corp.’s landfill in West Covina, closure of which is the subject of a court battle.

So city officials are searching for ways to dispose of trash--not just for the next few years, but for the next few decades. They have asked private garbage companies to submit ideas.

BFI and several of its competitors responded--including the industry leader, WMX Technologies, one of a handful of companies racing to build mega-landfills in remote desert regions.

WMX, based in Oak Brook, Ill., has proposed a landfill more than 20 times bigger than the Sunshine Canyon expansion in sparsely populated desert community of Amboy outside Needles.

Garbage would be hauled there by train. WMX has even gone so far as to aid opponents of Sunshine Canyon by testifying at public hearings against BFI’s expansion.

“Urban landfills are probably a thing of the past,” said Stu Clark, group vice president for WMX’s Waste Management unit here.

Waste Management also owns Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley, one of the few private landfills in the area that is expected to stay open unchallenged for about the next five years.

Torrance-based Western Waste Industries, which operates the El Sobrante Landfill in Riverside County, has also proposed a landfill to rival BFI’s in a remote corner of Imperial County near the Chocolate Mountains. This would be the biggest dump in the nation--ultimately containing 600 million tons of waste, said Richard Widrig, the company’s vice president of finance.

BFI’s response is to propose expanding Sunshine Canyon even further. The company is already preparing a study on making it into a dump six times bigger than the one now planned.

The current expansion would accommodate 17 million tons of garbage, but BFI hopes the site will eventually be approved for 100 million tons.

But since it’s taken BFI nearly 10 years to get approved for the current expansion, Lynn Scarlett, a solid-waste specialist with the L.A.-based Reason Foundation, said she “would have serious doubts” that BFI’s new plan will easily succeed. BFI’s Berghoff disagreed. “If we thought it would take 15 years we wouldn’t do it,” he said.