Community groups Kaunalewa and Nā Kiaʻi Kai, in partnership with Earthjustice, sent a letter to the County of Kauaʻi and state officials last week demanding the county abandon the proposal to site a new landfill on the Mānā Plain near Kekaha, Kauaʻi, on environmental justice grounds. Kekaha is recognized as a community suffering from severe environmental injustice because it already hosts numerous environmentally destructive land uses, including the current landfill.

“For far too long, Kekaha has been the island’s dumping grounds,” said Sean Andrade, Chief Executive Office of Kaunalewa, a Native Hawaiian beneficiary-led non-profit organization dedicated to cleaning up brownfield sites and ending environmental injustice in West Kauaʻi. “We want everyone to know that putting another landfill in our community’s backyard is not the solution.”

Kekaha is located on Kauaʻi’s lower-income, rural, and more indigenous West Side and has been burdened with hosting the island’s only landfill since the 1950s. The existing Kekaha landfill sits along the shoreline less than 1.5 miles from Kekaha town. The landfill towers over the coastline with a maximum permitted elevation of 120 feet, and the county has plans to both increase its height by another 50 feet and to add more landfill capacity on top of the adjacent unlined portion. Kekaha residents bear the nuisance of odor, noise, traffic, litter, and groundwater contamination from the landfill. Kauaʻi has a population of around 73,000 but provides services, including waste disposal, to an average of nearly 30,000 tourists per day. Kekaha residents make up just 4% of the island’s population.

The proposed new landfill site is located just north of the existing landfill on state-owned agricultural lands on the low-lying Mānā Plain.

“Siting a new landfill on the Mānā Plain raises major legal red flags because the site is located in a tsunami inundation zone and on state lands designated for agriculture and growing food, in particular. Native Hawaiian communities who have for decades withstood Kauaʻi’s environmental destruction and pollution should not be burdened with another landfill. This is environmental discrimination at its worst,” said Earthjustice Senior Attorney Kylie Wager Cruz. “The county, in coordination with other government agencies, must do right by these communities and comply with the law by immediately pivoting to non-West side alternatives.”

The Mānā Plain was famous for its thriving network of wetlands, and agricultural bounty but was transformed by the sugar industry, which drained the wetlands for sugar cultivation a century ago.

“Government should be focusing on restoring wetland and reef ecosystems on the West Side, not constructing another Mount ‘Ōpala here,” said Kawai Warren, member of Nā Kiaʻi Kai, a West Kauaʻi community group of Native Hawaiian subsistence fishers and gatherers. “The current landfill dominates our coastal landscape and there is trash strewn all over our beaches from passing rubbish trucks. The County has had decades to proactively plan for waste alternatives so that Kekaha residents don’t have to shoulder this burden anymore and now, in the eleventh hour, is shoving its problems on us again.”

Around 2018, the County made plans to site a new landfill on Maʻalo Road near Hanamāʻulu based on extensive studies and community engagement. According to the County, it abandoned this plan after receiving opposition from the state Department of Transportation due to concerns over proximity to the Līhuʻe airport. But at a Kauaʻi county council meeting last month, Council Member and former Mayor Bernard Carvalho urged the Department of Public Works to reconsider the Maʻalo Road landfill site, stating that the Maʻalo Road landfill would have been a “Disneyland of waste” that incorporated waste reduction, reuse, and recycling, and a program for managing birds. “I’m hoping that we can look at the whole picture again and relook at everything because everything was pretty much in place to relocate [the landfill] here at Maʻalo and out of Kekaha. And that was part of a whole process,” he said during the council meeting.