After Baltimore increased the disposal fees at its landfill for the first time in more than three decades, the amount of garbage delivered there by large commercial haulers dropped by nearly half — almost overnight.

The tonnage hauled by private companies to the Quarantine Road Landfill, located in Hawkins Point at Baltimore’s industrialized southern tip, plummeted to 4,364 in November and December from 8,585 tons in the same months in 2024, according to Department of Public Works figures. The drop is an apparent response to the city’s October decision to double its per-ton disposal fee.

City finance officials expect the new tipping fee — which increased from $67.50 to $135 per ton — to boost revenues this year, though not as much as hoped. According to Department of Finance projections, the loss of all that garbage will yield about $4 million less than what budget writers had anticipated.

Even so, Public Works officials called the drop good news.

That’s because space at the city-owned landfill is rapidly running out: DPW expects Quarantine Road to reach capacity in 2028. Though the city is pursuing an expansion, that effort is projected to cost $108 million, according to a capital planning report, and could buy the landfill as little as five more years, a DPW spokesperson said.

It’s not clear where the thousands of tons of trash diverted from Quarantine Road have gone. Publicly owned landfills in surrounding jurisdictions, such as Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties, don’t permit dumping of waste from outside their borders — meaning a lot of this trash may be headed out of state.

At a recent City Council hearing, officials attributed the decline to three big haulers, Waste Management, Baltimore-based Cockey’s Enterprises, and Republic Services, though a spokesperson for Republic said the company had only dumped the equivalent of two truckloads at Quarantine Road since 2021.

Waste Management and Cockey’s did not respond to emailed questions.

DPW spokeswoman Mary Stewart said the city didn’t increase its tipping fee for years out of concern that it would result in illegal dumping, a possibility raised by Councilwoman Odette Ramos when she was informed of the sudden drop at a recent hearing.

DPW officials, though, say that isn’t the case. Stewart said the city’s tipping fee, which hadn’t changed since 1993, was “artificially low” compared to surrounding counties, and DPW officials expect the cost increase is having the intended effect of diverting trash to other jurisdictions and preserving precious space at Quarantine Road.

Jennifer Kunze, the Maryland organizing director for Clean Water Action, was surprised and encouraged to see how quickly trash volumes delivered to South Baltimore dropped after the city increased its fee. But she wishes the city had taken action sooner.

“How much have we filled up the landfill more than we needed to, just because this fee wasn’t increasing?” Kunze asked.

Capacity challenges at the landfill come as Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration has pursued slashing its reliance on landfilling and incineration by 90%, a goal that would require diverting hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage a year into recycling and composting.

It would also require ending the city’s relationship with the giant trash incinerator south of downtown, which currently handles close to a third of the waste picked up by city haulers.

So far, the drop in disposal at the city landfill doesn’t seem to have meant more business for the incinerator, which is owned by New Hampshire-based WIN Waste Innovations.

WIN Waste spokesperson Mary Urban said the incinerator operates near its maximum capacity and tends to rely on longer-term contracts with large clients, such as the city and Baltimore County. Compared to a year before, the incinerator saw a small decrease in total tonnage after the landfill hiked its fee, she said.

Urban said the need to hike fees at the city landfill sends an ”urgent signal” of a looming waste capacity crisis.

She said she suspects the haulers that previously relied on the South Baltimore landfill are trucking waste to Virginia or Pennsylvania, a result she called a “problematic and volatile” answer to the city’s waste challenges.

For now, WIN Waste is one of the landfill’s biggest users. Much of the ash its incinerator generates goes to Quarantine Road — nearly 100,000 tons last year, according to the company.

WIN Waste also pays a separate, much lower disposal fee for its ash — a point of frustration for some environmental advocates.

Carlos Sanchez, an organizer with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, welcomed the news of declining landfill use but criticized what he called a “troubling lack of follow-through” by the city.

Sanchez’s organization filed a federal civil rights complaint in 2024 arguing that city leaders had failed to take adequate steps to phase out incineration and landfilling, leaving low-income communities of color to bear the air pollution burden. Within months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opened an investigation.

In that complaint, activists called for an increase to the Quarantine Road tipping fee, and Sanchez said the recent change “demonstrates what is possible when residents organize and insist on accountability.”

Still, Sanchez has pushed for the city to stop using WIN Waste, in part to end the stream of incinerator ash to South Baltimore. That ash accounts for roughly a third of the waste dumped at the landfill each year.