SEATTLE — How much garbage can you cram into 1.4 square miles?
At least 50 years’ worth, and probably closer to 75, provided you stack the trash hundreds of feet high.
King County has only one active landfill, where the rubbish produced by more than 1.4 million people is hauled, dumped, compacted and layered into a modest trash mountain lorded over by a fleet of semi-trucks, bulldozers and bald eagles. (Eagles love garbage.)
But the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill, located in South King County, between Renton and Maple Valley, is (sort of) filling up.
The landfill has, in fact, been (sort of) filling up for decades.
In 2001, the last time the county produced a comprehensive plan for how to handle its garbage, the landfill was going to be full by 2012.