Carolina landfill neighbor seeks DNER hearing over 17 buffer cuerdas
Caribbean Golf Academy has asked Puerto Rico's Department of Natural and Environmental Resources to open a formal adjudicatory proceeding on the renewal of the Carolina municipal landfill's operating permit, the San Juan Daily Star and NotiCel reported on November 3, 2026. The company, which with Hacienda Campo Rico owns land next to the landfill, says the facility grew into a protected buffer zone.
What the company wants reviewed
The request came in an informational motion, the San Juan Daily Star reported, and NotiCel said it follows a ruling of the Court of Appeals. The company wants the department to examine three questions, NotiCel reported: whether the landfill can grow through the renewal of an expired permit, whether the Municipality of Carolina and its operator, Landfill Gas Technologies, broke the permit's conditions, and whether the landfill operates on land the law specially protects.
The president of both companies said the expansion of the landfill's Cell C affected about 17 cuerdas of a 35-cuerda buffer zone inside the Special Planning Area of the Piñones State Forest. He said the project filed with the Planning Board contemplated a 10-cuerda cell on land the landfill had already disturbed, and that the municipality did not tell regulators in its 2011 and 2024 renewal requests that the expansion would reach the buffer zone, NotiCel reported. He added that the municipality has not submitted a survey with coordinates that sets the expansion's limits.
The company also alleges work outside authorized areas and leachate discharges, the San Juan Daily Star reported. It wants an environmental impact statement, a halt to what it considers unlawful activity and mitigation before any renewal is approved, and says it does not oppose the landfill's operation, only its growth into the buffer zone. The department and the municipality had not responded, the paper reported.
The motion follows a 28-page memorial the two companies filed with the Senate's Tourism, Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs Commission, in which they said a department official gave conflicting figures for the size of the expansion, NotiCel reported on October 18, 2026.
The two properties
The landfill sits on a property on Avenida José Severo Quiñones in Buena Vista, Carolina that covers 1,429,123 m2, about 363.6 cuerdas. The Puerto Rico Land Use Plan classes 67% of it as specially protected rural land and 33% as common rural land, and 73.2% of it lies in flood zone AE.
The Hacienda Campo Rico property shares a boundary with the landfill's and covers 1,226,696 m2, about 312.1 cuerdas. The plan classes it as specially protected rural land, and 86.8% of it lies in flood zone AE.
The landfill property carries 39 permit filings, deleted ones left out, and none of them describes a Cell C expansion. The newest is a combined use permit for the landfill's administrative offices, filed by the municipal government and dated November 3, 2026, recorded as approved. It covers the offices, not the operating permit now before the department.
