Simi Valley Gets a Taste of Someone Else's Problem

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-04 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

A massive cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights caught fire in June. Eighty million pounds of food went bad. Now someone else is living with the smell.

That someone is Simi Valley.

The spoiled food from Lineage Logistics has been trucked fifty miles inland to the Simi Valley Landfill, where it's been piling up for weeks now. Residents in the nearby Big Sky neighborhood started noticing something foul in the air. Not the kind of thing you can ignore. They're talking about opening their doors to find their entire day ruined by the smell.

More or less what you'd expect from decomposing food in a landfill. But people are upset because no one warned them.

They filed complaints with the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District. The district sent inspectors on August 11. Two of them showed up, looked around, smelled the exact thing residents had been complaining about, and confirmed: yes, the stench is real, and yes, it's coming from the rotting food.

The district issued a notice of violation.

Lineage says the waste is being split across nine different locations throughout Southern California and beyond—Brea, Corona, Bloomington, San Pedro, Granada, and others. They claim they're sorting everything, sealing containers, spraying them down before transport. All standard practice, as far as I can tell. Waste Management, which operates the Simi Valley facility, hasn't had much to say. They're permitted to take food waste. The rotting stuff makes up a small percentage of what comes through. Fair enough.

But here's the thing. Actually, that's not quite right—here's the actual problem. The people living two miles away from the landfill are still catching the smell. Residents heard nothing about the incoming waste before it arrived. No heads-up. No consultation. Just one day the stench showed up and stayed.

The air district is continuing to monitor. More complaints keep coming in—twenty-plus in August alone. Headaches, flies, windows that can't stay open because the smell penetrates anyway.

A disaster in one neighborhood doesn't get to quietly become a disaster in another.

Source: "Inspectors noted the odor emanating from putrescent food waste as a result of the Lineage Logistics fire and determined the odor from the food was a public nuisance." — NBC Los Angeles

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