Lake View Landfill

About the Program
WM's Lake View Landfill program is located about five miles southeast of Lake Erie in Erie, Pennsylvania, and focuses on a full range of solid waste hauling and disposal services for commercial, industrial and residential customers. The site is making an ongoing effort to address multiple habitat needs as well as to educate the local community. In particular, the team builds loosely formed brush piles out of excavated material to create valuable habitat for a variety of species to use for cover, breeding, nesting, hunting and roosting. The project targets mammals, including chipmunks, cotton-tailed rabbits, field mice, raccoons, red foxes, squirrels and white-tailed deer.

Practices and Impacts

• Brush piles are created out of materials being moved on-site, from excavation or other projects, to create habitat for a variety of species to utilize for taking cover, eating, nesting, breeding and roosting. The team maintains the brush piles and continues to build new piles from excavated trees, branches, leaves and boulders as they become available. These brush piles create valuable habitat from the edge area between the forested and grassland areas to address the needs of local wildlife.
• Over the past years, the team has observed 45 different wildlife species. 
• In order to help cavity-nesting bird species which have been impacted by loss of suitable nesting habitat, the team has maintained nesting boxes around the grassland and wetland areas on site.
• There are currently ten boxes in use, which were newly installed in 2020.
• Since 2017, the project site has been monitored by the Motus Wildlife Tracking System which uses radio telemetry to identify bird species. The data collected is transmitted and used by researchers studying bird populations.