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This is Larry Mantle. 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of air Talk on LA, 89.3.

We've discussed the biggest topics of the day for decades.

Thank you for joining me for the biggest conversation in Southern California for 40 years.

Hey, this is in Perfect Paradise.

I'm Antonio Cerejito.

There's this one chore all Americans carry out week after week. At my house, it's my husband who wheels out the three trash bins we have every

Friday morning. And then that garbage is sort of forgotten. We never think about it again.

Americans actually throw out almost five pounds of trash per person every single day. Multiply that

by the nation's population, and we're talking almost 1.6 billion pounds of trash. So the trash does have to go somewhere. And a lot of us

assume that garbage is disposed of responsibly, like at a regional landfill. But what if huge

piles of it filled with all kinds of waste, from diapers to concrete, to even construction debris. All got mixed up and thrown

away together, but not in a landfill. That's exactly what's happening at three places in

Anelope Valley. Hundreds of thousands of tons of waste accumulating and forming massive,

often multiple feet high piles across the desert.

In some cases, not far from people's homes.

Things have gotten so bad with the level of illegal dumping there that back in February, Calycle,

the state agency

in charge of waste, issued an emergency regulation, stating the problem was degrading the

environment, causing fires, and posing a risk to human health and safety.

Today, on Imperfect Paradise, we talk with L.A. science reporter Jacob Margolis about the illegal

...