WAI'ANAE — Nearly 40,000 pounds of recalled beef tumbled out of a semi truck into the Waimanalo Gulch Landfill yesterday — part of the nation's largest meat recall ever.

The frozen logs of ground beef, each about the size of a fireplace log, had been intended for school lunches on O'ahu. But they were thrown away because federal authorities recalled 143 million pounds of beef nationwide last month from the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in Chino, Calif. The recalled meat was processed from February 2006 through February 2008.

Much of the recalled meat nationwide has been eaten, but there have been no reports of illness or death. Neither the state Department of Education nor Y Hata & Co. Ltd., the DOE's food supplier, could say how much was eaten in Hawai'i.

"We know that some of the meat was eaten," said Susan Uyehara, director of the DOE's Hawai'i Child Nutrition Program. "But it's hard to quantify how much."

Uyehara said the federal government will reimburse the state for the cost of the meat.

In 2007, 18.9 million lunches were served in Hawai'i to 101,000 students at about 257 schools under the nutrition program.

Kurt Fey, direct of operations for Y Hata, said 160,000 pounds of the meat intended for the Hawai'i school lunches remained when the recall was announced and that will have to be thrown away.

"The product we have in house isn't from 2006," Fey said. "We didn't have any product that old. The total on hand was about 4,000 cases for a total of 80 tons of meat."

All of the recalled meat shipped to Hawai'i was intended for school lunches.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture determined the meat was unfit for humans because the California-based meat processor didn't always follow proper slaughter procedures.

At the landfill yesterday, two containers of the frozen meat, about 20 tons, were dumped. Another couple of loads were expected to be dumped today, Fey said. Each Neighbor Island is responsible for disposing of its recalled meat.

Joe Whelan, vice president and general manager for Waste Management, the firm that operates the Waimanalo Gulch landfill on the Wai'anae Coast, said it was the best place for the meat. The meat wouldn't burn at the right temperature to create energy at the H-Power garbage-to-energy plant.

And 20 tons of meat was no problem. Each day about 800 to 900 tons of rubbish is dumped at the landfill, Whelan said.

"This is what landfills are designed to do, take things from natural disasters or recalls and bury them. By tomorrow the site will be compacted and covered over with a layer of soil."

Reach Suzanne Roig at sroig@honoluluadvertiser.com.