I approach the open pit of Lane County, Oregon’s Short Mountain Landfill on olfactory alert, mouth-breathing in case the odor is as overpowering as I expect an acre of open trash to be. I take a tiny, furtive sniff. Not bad. I inhale less tentatively, to be sure, and then finally, take a healthy, uninhibited snort. It’s a sour smell, like a film of old milk on the inside of an empty plastic jug, but on a grander scale. It’s unpleasant, but surprisingly, not nauseating. The view, on the other hand, is pretty offensive.

I am standing at the edge of a huge pit, a third of which is covered by trash, a ragged spread of barely discernable, soiled material. Two gigantic yellow bulldozers with eight-foot high, knobbed steel wheels rumble around down in the pit, compacting the spongy surface. Thirty feet above the pit, a dingy blue and yellow compactor truck backs up to the ramp. Its convex rear door pops open, erupting trash—a waterfall of black plastic bags, Styrofoam and wood scraps. It’s hard to identify objects, but I think I see a mattress tumble through the stream. Before I can find it in the conical mound that forms below the truck, though, one of the giant dozers gouges the pile with its 10-foot-high blade, pushing buoyant debris before it like a breaking ocean wave.

What’s most notable about the trash is that it is overwhelmingly plastic. Looking over the pit’s surface, I spot a scrap of cotton clothing here, a tattered newspaper there, an occasional soiled plush toy, but that’s about it.  The lack of anything organic isn’t surprising though -- Lane County’s recycling and composting programs divert 52 percent of the waste stream, from newspapers to grass clippings to food scraps, before it reaches Short Mountain Landfill. While that efficiency—27 percent better than the national average—saves space at the dump, it has a surprising downside: the facility’s landfill gas-powered electric plant is now running at only a little more than half of its capacity.

Short Mountain is one of 375 landfills in the United States that taps the methane created by its decomposing garbage and burns it to generate electricity. At Short Mountain, the putrid gas supplies enough electricity to power 1,300 nearby homes, but in the 13 years since the landfill’s power plant was constructed, gas output has steadily declined. Instead of powering all four of the facility’s locomotive-sized generators around the clock as it once did, there’s now only enough gas to run two engines full time and a third during work-day hours. That shortfall, say the plant’s managers, is attributable to one thing: a decreasing percentage of organics in the county’s trash.

As Doug Hoover presses buttons on the Gem 2000, the phonebook-sized gadget emits shrill beeps similar to the sounds a microwave makes while being programmed to cook miniature pizzas. Instead, far less savory, Doug is preparing to sample the gaseous emissions from a million-ton garbage stew. He’ll hook the machine up to lines from a half-dozen of Short Mountain’s 101 landfill gas wells for a routine check of output and gas content. It’s a warm, sunny morning in April, atypical for Oregon, but par for a winter and spring that has produced only 39 percent of normal precipitation. While no one likes to work in the rain, this dry weather actually makes Doug’s job as power plant operator all the more critical as he tries to coax as much gas as possible out of the landfill to replace the anticipated shortage of hydro-generated energy from low river flows.

Dressed in jeans, a gray T-shirt and work boots, Doug has the solid build you’d expect of a man running a power plant. His hair is cut short, his moustache is trim, and his arched eyebrows give him an alert, intelligent look. Doug has been with the project since its inception and is one of two Eugene People’s Utility District (EPUD) employees—the public utility that owns the electric plant—working full-time at the landfill.