Solid waste collection company Republic Services is celebrating the reopening of the Sawtooth Regional Landfill in Elmore County today. The company purchased the site, previously called the Simco Road Regional landfill, out of receivership last year for a reported $15 million.
“We saw really underutilized capabilities through this landfill from how it previously existed,” said Republic Services General Manager Chase Cresto.
Mounting debt and environmental violations forced the landfill near the Elmore-Ada County line to close in late 2023. That left Elmore County shipping around half of its solid waste – approximately 50 tons a day – first to Burley, then to Ada County until about May 2025, when Elmore County’s main landfill was approved to take the full daily volume of collected waste, county staff said.
The Sawtooth Regional Landfill is now back in good standing with environmental regulators, after significant infrastructure work. Even prior to closing on its purchase of the landfill, Republic Services had to show Elmore County and the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality its plan to deal with about 500,000 tires, steep and dangerous slopes and trash piled up outside the liner protecting the ground below.
“We've had to move hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of soil, and then we had to relocate over 300,000 yd³ of waste," explained Republic Services Environmental Manager Jorden Foster. “That's a big task on top of building a new [17 acre] cell in order to move that waste into that new cell.”
The tires are being shredded and landfilled on site, with about 25% of the pile remaining, Foster said. Republic has also installed a leachate pond, which collects the liquid runoff from the landfill and allows the water to evaporate. A pond was always planned for the site, according to Foster, but it did not exist when Republic bought the landfill.
Cresto said he didn’t know the exact amount the company spent to reopen the landfill, and didn’t want to speculate. But he called the cost “significant.”
Republic Services, the largest waste collection company in the state, will be able to use the landfill for waste generated anywhere it collects. It will also take a lot of the commercial waste generated in Elmore county, and solid waste from the Mountain Home Air Force Base, according to the county.
The site has around 200 years of capacity, according to Republic Services.
“We're going into long-term disposal capacity and infrastructure here,” Cresto said, noting the growth of the Treasure Valley to the east, and Mountain Home to the west. “Geographically, there's value for not just Republic Services, but all our haulers, too. And potentially, all our customers will see the value from a flexibility standpoint [and an] operational standpoint, that they can then pass on to their customers,” he said.
