Even Trash Isn’t Safe From California’s Regulatory Overkill

The Golden State’s overreach extends to the garbage, but these policies ignore the real trash.

California regulates everything. Gas stoves, pronouns, lawn equipment, cow farts — if there’s a way to insert bureaucratic red tape into daily life, Sacramento will find it. 

In the Golden State, taking out the garbage has become an environmental chess match. The latest battleground? Landfills. California’s newest proposed landfill regulations read like something drafted by a Berkeley philosophy department on edibles — abstract, vague, and completely detached from physical reality.

Ignoring the Problem

In 2015, I led the group pursuing the American Apparel buyout. While the media fixated on the company’s branding and social controversies, California’s regulatory messaging conveniently ignored textiles — one of the most pollutive industries on the planet. This was one example of how the state tends to focus on performative issues while disregarding meaningful, industrial oversight. This is useful if you are constructing a wildlife highway crossing, but counterproductive when avoiding industrial oversight. That’s the California model: overlook real problems; obsess over symbolic ones.

California Landfill Management Mandates

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) is mandating sweeping new standards for landfill management, emissions monitoring, and methane capture, despite no clear evidence that existing systems are failing. The new mandates are so convoluted that even seasoned waste management firms — already complying with state audits and clean-air rules — are struggling to interpret them.

In Los Angeles County, one landfill had to close in part because of state rules that extend beyond federal standards. Local politicians’ preferences for grandstanding instead of serving constitutions impeded the landfill’s ability to regulate an extremely rare chemical reaction. 

The result? Nobody’s using less trash, but now more taxpayer money funds the removal of trash farther away. Local politicians do nothing but make wild, unsubstantiated claims about both public infrastructure and the landfill’s environmental impact and promise to investigate alleged price gouging. 

Political Appearances over Real Solutions

This isn’t responsible environmentalism — it’s bureaucratic posing with a green label to give Sacramento a win for its climate PR campaign. And it’s insulting to people impacted by real disasters.

This type of moral preening is normal for California. As I detail in my my book, The Myth of California: How Big Government Destroyed the Golden State, rural Californians, small haulers, low-income urban families — the very people who can’t afford flashy “zero-waste” solutions — suffer most from this overreach.

California specializes in virtuous messaging and theatrical regulation. Think back to the Covid era: restaurants in Los Angeles were banned from outdoor service while Gov. Gavin Newsom wined and dined indoors at the French Laundry. Health officers shut down mom-and-pop shops, but kept Hollywood open for business. Don’t  forget Newsom’s request to Trump for a $7.5 billion tax credit for the same Hollywood elite who bankrolled anti-capitalist Public Service Announcements . 

Regulation for Thee, Not for Me

The trend continues, as evident in the recent wildfires. Sacramento found time to micromanage but failed to maintain basic fire readiness. Officials ignored brush-clearing, scared off timber companies, left reservoirs empty, and defunded fire crews. Then, when the inevitable fires came, they blamed “climate change” instead of their own negligence. Southern California, for all its branding as a Mediterranean paradise, is effectively on the edge of a desert, where low humidity and highly flammable terrain mean that fires catch fast and burn hard.

California’s fire crisis wasn’t just predictable — it was avoidable.

And now, the same bureaucratic class that botched pandemic policy and ignored fire safety has decided trash is the next moral frontier.

Here’s the kicker: methane emissions from landfills have been dropping steadily. Thanks to private sector innovation and EPA [spell out]guidance, most landfill operators already cap and convert methane into energy. But that’s not enough for CalRecycle — they’ve invented a maze of ideological scoring systems and compliance traps that give unelected officials enormous latitude to fine or shut down operators who don’t align with their worldview.

Worse, private operators — often more efficient and environmentally sound — are being boxed out. Public landfills, by contrast, receive carve-outs. This is regulatory capture in a green tuxedo: politically connected government facilities win, and private firms that actually serve the public get steamrolled.

When do these targeted regulations cross into antitrust or discrimination? With EPA-compliant methane systems already in place, is federal preemption in play here? Are we watching a slow-motion attempt to edge out private enterprise and replace it with unionized public monopolies?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) should be looking closely. We’ve seen this pattern before — state officials using climate language to pass hidden taxes, steer contracts to political allies, and crowd out private competition. The landfill war is only the latest front in California’s ideological enforcement campaign.

Trash is not a political weapon. It’s not a climate trophy. It’s a basic municipal service. But in California, even taking out the garbage must be done with the moral urgency of Greta Thunberg and the budget of Elon Musk. Meanwhile, the rest of the country watches in disbelief.

While Sacramento cracks down on legal landfills, it can’t clean up the illegal ones. Drive through any homeless encampment in Los Angeles or San Francisco, and you’ll see open-air dumps, biohazards, and fires burning in broad daylight. No methane monitors there. No carbon offsets. Just rot in homeless settlements, where 50 percent of wildfires start, according Jim Desmond, supervisor on San Diego County’s board of supervisors, another issue California wants to ignore.

California doesn’t need more regulation. It needs a reality check. Maybe the DOJ and EPA should bring one.