New Mexico
Solid waste facilities
The Resource Recovery Bureau of the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), which NMED renamed from its Solid Waste Bureau, permits and registers the state's solid waste facilities and oversees their compliance. It also runs recycling, composting and grant programs. Its work follows the New Mexico Solid Waste Act and the Solid Waste Rules, among other state and federal laws and rules.
In a Phase I ESA
The Bureau's facility lists are the New Mexico form of the state landfill and solid waste disposal site records that ASTM E1527-21 lists as a standard source. The general reading of a landfill listing is on the landfills and solid waste page. Three New Mexico details shape the search.
- Permits and registrations are separate. Under Section 74-9-20 of the Solid Waste Act a permit is needed to build, run or close a solid waste facility, a term that takes in landfills, processing and transformation facilities, and transfer stations handling more than 240 cubic yards a day on a monthly average. Certain other kinds of facility are registered instead, under 20.9.3.27 to 20.9.3.30 NMAC as the Permitting and Registration page cites them (NMED's Laws and Regulations page labels 20.9.3 Facility Grant Fund): collection centers open to the public below that volume, recycling and composting facilities that take only source-separated material, small animal crematoria, air curtain incinerators and law enforcement pharmaceutical incinerators. Haulers register too: every hauler of special waste, and commercial haulers of solid waste. Registrations last five years; permits last twenty.
- No list of closed landfills. The Bureau links one list of landfills that are permitted and open and another of landfills permitted to take special waste. The pages read link no list of closed or old landfills. NMED's Neglected Contamination Sites page counts landfills from before regulation and illegal dumps among neglected sites.
- Permits go through a hearing. An applicant meets the Bureau's Permit Section before applying, a public hearing is held on every application found administratively complete, and the NMED Secretary decides. The Bureau prepares Public Involvement Plans for current permitting actions and posts them, with some of the applications themselves.
The Bureau's page also announces new PFAS constituents for groundwater monitoring at landfills, effective January 1, 2026, with a fact sheet and an updated parameter list. For a landfill near the property, ask whether its file holds groundwater monitoring results.
Where to look a site up
- The Bureau's Permitted/Registered Facilities And Haulers page links lists, most of them PDF files, of registered collection centers, composting facilities and recycling facilities, permitted transfer stations, tire recycling facilities, landfills permitted and open, and landfills permitted to accept special waste, and lists of registered haulers. This handbook did not open them.
- The Bureau's pages link two different files under each landfill label. The addresses of the open landfill files carry September 2022 and May 2025, and those of the special waste landfill files 07.01.22 and 02-12-2025. The Resource Recovery Bureau home page links the files whose addresses carry May 2025 and 02-12-2025. Check the date on whichever list you use.
- The Permitting and Registration page posts the current Public Involvement Plans.
- The Bureau's line is 505-827-0197.
Getting the file
NMED takes records requests under the Inspection of Public Records Act through its Public Records Requests page: by its online portal, which needs no account, by mail to P.O. Box 5469, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87502, or by telephone at (505) 827-2855. The Public records requests page here gives what a request must hold and the fees.
Sources
New Mexico Environment Department pages, read October 13, 2026, no modified date shown: