Dumps

Hein Lam of Arcadia picked the wrong day to clean out his garage and take a load of three old computers to the Puente Hills landfill near Whittier. As he unloaded trash bags from his minivan, Lam was greeted by a team of state investigators, which promptly issued him a citation for illegal disposal of hazardous waste.

Adding another wrinkle to a decades-old controversy over a giant dump in the north San Fernando Valley, the state has approved a request by the operator of Sunshine Canyon Landfill to step in and oversee enforcement of waste laws at the facility until a city-county joint agency is approved. Sunshine Canyon is actually two landfills roughly a quarter of a mile apart, which puts them in different jurisdictions: one in the city of Los Angeles, the other in unincorporated county territory.

From a distance, the 70-foot-high stack looks like a volcano in the mist. Up close, it's nothing more than a smoldering mountain of densely packed mulch, a local eyesore that caught fire here Christmas Day and is still burning. For weeks, local and state officials bickered over who would pay to put out the flames. Residents, fed up with the smoke and ash, appeared at a City Council meeting in gas masks to protest the delay.

County supervisors voted 3 to 2 Tuesday to approve a revised permit for the Sunshine Canyon Landfill, restricting the flow of trash into the site and limiting operations to 30 years. The permit for the landfill near Granada Hills includes a prohibition on accepting trash from outside the county and on operating before 6 a.m. The landfill must also record complaints, monitor air quality and correct pollution problems.

A federal judge in Riverside on Thursday fined the owner of a notorious illegal dump and ordered him to pay $46.9 million to clean up the site, which officials say represents a serious threat to the residents and environment of the Coachella Valley.

Mounds of titanium and steel glinted in the afternoon sun, valves and pipes protruding in all directions like half-formed metal organisms. In one corner of the warehouse was a twin of the Apollo command module engine that brought Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong back from the surface of the moon nearly 40 years ago. Nearby was the second-stage motor for a Saturn V, the most powerful rocket ever used in the U.S. space program.

Photographer Troy Paiva journeyed to a remote corner of the Mojave Desert in search of the Exotic World of Burlesque Museum but quickly caught a whiff of something even more jolting. Instead of the stripper museum, which had recently abandoned dusty Helendale for Las Vegas, Paiva found mounds of rotting perishables, including a festering stew of whipped cream, eggnog and toothpaste.

\o7Goodbye and good riddance! \f7That was the sentiment at Sun Valley festivities Saturday to mark the closing of the long-despised Bradley Landfill. In this northeastern edge of the San Fernando Valley, civic leaders and residents celebrated as the landfill received its final truckload of trash. "We're smiling because this dump we've had to endure in Sun Valley is closing," Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas said after a ceremony to mark the occasion.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday to consider banning plastic foam food containers from restaurants and stores in unincorporated areas because they add to the region's mounting pollution problem. At the urging of Supervisors Yvonne B.

As new high-definition televisions fly off store shelves, millions of old sets soon could be flying into the trash. A major change to broadcast television in 2009 -- the conversion from analog signals to all digital -- is expected to send many Americans to the store for new TV sets. That could mean a flood of outdated TVs, which contain lead-encased picture tubes and other hazardous material, heading into landfills. "There's going to be an e-waste tsunami that hits America," said John S.