Cleanup has begun on a decades-old landfill in Salt Lake City – all for the Utah Inland Port

Mark Nord, director of real estate and development for the Utah Inland Port Authority, and the port authority’s board chair Abby Osborne look in to the first trench dug as part of efforts to clean up the old North Temple landfill located near 7200 West north of I-80 in Salt Lake City on May 28, 2025. (Katie McKellar/Utah News Dispatch)

For almost five decades, a toxic sea of slowly decomposing trash has rested — hidden just below a grassy surface where, today, antelope sometimes graze. 

Ever since it closed down in 1979, the old North Temple landfill spanning 770 acres across a remote area between the Great Salt Lake and Salt Lake City International Airport has sat undisturbed. 

That is, until now.

On Wednesday, a small group of state officials gathered around a single excavator that was waiting to take the first scoop out of the landfill in decades — marking the beginning of a yearslong and expensive project to clean up the property and free it for industrial development that political leaders see as crucial for the state’s economic future.

“Let’s open this baby up!” shouted Gary McEntee, manager of Ninigret Construction, one of several companies state officials have contracted with to clean up the site. 

Some cheered as the excavator roared to life. The first scoop mostly contained “cover material,” McEntee said. “Just dirt.” 

When the second scoop was dumped off to the side, it clinked with glass bottles. Then came a tire, and half-decomposed remains of countless other pieces of trash that were discarded decades ago. Mixed in with the dirt was a hair comb, mangled bits of unrecognizable rubber, and who knows what else. 

A few more swipes, and it didn’t take long for the stench to hit. As the rancid odor began to waft, McEntee ordered onlookers to stand off to the side, upwind. Once the excavator’s claw hit a layer of clay, he told the digger to stop so everyone could peer down into the trench and see the black sludge below. 

The grey leachate — toxic water that has percolated through all the layers of garbage — pooled at the bottom, dripping from the sides. The clay, McEntee explained, is largely why the landfill has had “minimal” contamination seeping off site because the thick clay has acted as a barrier, collecting all the leachate in something of a “bathtub.” 

There’s no telling exactly how much leachate will need to be dug up and pumped through an evaporative process as part of remediation efforts. But crews expect maybe 50,000 to 100,000 gallons just for the first phase of the cleanup, which includes 180 acres. As for the other 590 acres? They’re expecting a lot more — hundreds of thousands of gallons more leachate. 

It will take at least six or seven years — maybe many more, especially if crews come across something unexpected in the layers of dirt and garbage. 

There’s a reason why no one’s cleaned up this old Salt Lake City landfill until now. For starters, it’s expensive. State officials estimate it will cost upwards of $200 million — likely more — over the next six or seven years. 

But why now? 

The push to clean up the landfill now — not later

For years, state leaders have eyed the site as a key parcel for the Utah Inland Port Authority, a powerful and controversial state entity that the Utah Legislature created in 2018 with the mission of establishing Utah as a “pivotal hub” in global trade and commerce. 

No, landlocked Utah doesn’t have a waterway or a shoreline that typically host ports, but the state’s Republican leaders have long had a vision that establishing the Utah Inland Port Authority would better coordinate the state’s warehouse, trucking and rail network to maximize the state’s import and export potential.

Back in 2018, a real estate arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints named the Suburban Land Reserve donated the landfill to the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), which manages a portfolio of trust land to generate revenue for public schools and other state institutions. 

Trust Lands officials had already started the process to remediate the site in a “phased approach,” according to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. But rather than cleaning up and developing parts of the 770 acres one at a time over the span of 20 or 30 years, state leaders wanted to tackle the project faster.

“The reality was someone was going to have to take this burden on at some point,” Ben Hart, executive director of the Utah Inland Port Authority, told Utah News Dispatch. “To a certain degree, it had been kicked down the road.” 

For port authority officials, Hart said their stance was “you can’t kick it down the road any further.” Waiting wasn’t “ideal,” he said, adding that “there was going to come a day” in 20 or 30 years that contaminants from the landfill could eventually seep into the Great Salt Lake.  

Plus, he said it’s more appealing for businesses to come to a fully remediated site rather than right next door to a former landfill. And he said costs would likely skyrocket in 20 years compared to today’s price tag. 

“Ultimately, for our partners, that was a hard and fast (rule) for us. We have to do this in five or six years. This cannot be a 20 or 30 year remediation,” Hart said.

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That led to some “difficult negotiations” with SITLA officials that spanned years, he said. But in February, the port authority bought the land for $8 million, plus it paid $2 million to cover SITLA’s costs related to the property and additional payments to satisfy existing contractual agreements for previous remediation plans.

“Yes, it led to some very hard conversations. It led to a two-year negotiation process with the prior land owner (SITLA),” Hart said. “And we don’t begrudge SITLA at all. They had a vision. They had some financial constraints. The port does not have those, so we felt like we were the better entity to take this on.” 

Financial means and the desire to develop the land quicker were the main reasons behind the port authority’s decision to take over the landfill remediation project, Hart said. To fund the remediation, port authority officials plan to use about $150 million in bonds the Utah Inland Port Authority Board voted to issue back in 2021. The rest, Hart said, will come from tax increment funds collected through the port authority’s project area. 

At the time, port authority officials envisioned using the $150 million in bonds to fund a massive truck-to-train transloading facility. But those plans have since been abandoned, the port authority’s brand and leadership changed amid frustration over lack of progress, and now instead state leaders are envisioning the landfill site to eventually be a hub for “advanced manufacturing.” 

That’s how Abby Osborne, Utah Inland Port Authority Board chair who is also chief of staff for Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, described it. In a speech before the excavator took its first scoop, Osborne motioned out to the east, where several Amazon warehouses have already been built nearby, saying “growth is coming this way.” 

“We really want to make this an epicenter of advanced manufacturing. Not just distribution centers, but advanced manufacturing with really high-paying jobs,” Osborne said. “This is going to be an economic engine for the state.” 

Osborne applauded the plans to push forward with more complete remediation now rather than later. 

“We’re going to start remediating, and we’re not going to stop remediating,” she said to applause. “We’re not going to develop until we stop remediating.”

Osborne also gave a nod to environmental reasons to clean up the landfill now, rather than later. 

“We’re on the edge of the Great Salt Lake,” she said. “We all know how important it is to this ecosystem and to this valley, and we’re going to make sure we do everything to protect it.

Continued controversy 

From the beginning, the Utah Inland Port Authority has been a controversial body. When lawmakers first created it, it took control of some 16,000 acres in Salt Lake County, some of which made up about a third of Salt Lake City’s remaining developable land.

Salt Lake City leaders cried overreach; they sued. A few years later, city leaders negotiated some changes to the board and its control over the inland port’s future tax increment, and the public tensions between the state and city over the issue largely fizzled. 

But environmental advocates remain staunch opponents. A coalition of community organizations called Stop The Polluting Ports are challenging the port authority’s constitutionality in court, and they continue to fight it as a “boondoggle” to benefit developers at the expense of Utahns and the environment. 

They contend the port authority — through its planned developments in not just Salt Lake City but also its “satellite” ports in rural areas across the state — will only bring more warehouses, trucks and pollution to the state. 

Deeda Seed, a senior campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity who is also part of the Stop the Polluting Ports coalition, questions the port authority’s involvement in the landfill remediation and whether state officials can safely clean up the site within their desired timeframe. 

“I don’t really know if it can be done faster,” she said. “There’s a question about what are we the public getting in return? Are we going to get a more competent remediation? Or are we going to get a rushed remediation that cuts corners?”

She said the landfill is no “urgent crisis,” adding it’s been “stable” ever since it closed in 1979. But now that developers are starting to butt up against the landfill’s boundaries, they want to free up the land, and that’s the real “pressure point,” she said. 

“That’s really why they want to clean up the landfill, for the developers, to develop,” she said. 

Seed added that tax increment dollars that are supposed to offset impacts from industrial development on Salt Lake City residents are now going to be instead used to help finance the landfill remediation to “incentivize more industrial development.” 

“The bigger threat,” Seed said, isn’t the landfill, but pollution from all the development the inland port authority is bringing to not just Salt Lake City, but across the state. 

Seed also argued the landfill remediation is more about “the port authority being able to justify its existence.” 

“The port authority started as a boondoggle, and it’s still a boondoggle,” she said. “Every taxpayer in Utah should be concerned about this.” 

Seed likened the landfill remediation to “putting lipstick on a pig.” 

“They’re dressing up a very damaging agency with environmental remediation rhetoric,” she said. “But when you look at what is intended to happen in all of these (inland port) locations, the potential for enormous harm is there.” 

State officials including Hart and Osborne insist they’re working to “do this right.” 

To continued criticisms aimed at the port authority, Hart said he welcomes their involvement because they’ve “forced us to be better.” 

“We meet with them regularly. I would say they’re very well-intentioned individuals,” Hart said, though he added, “I think they’re getting fewer and fewer things to complain about because I think the port is doing right by everyone. Our hope is eventually to give them nothing to complain about.” 

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