Click here to read a blog entry from Shannon Crawley, a 2011 CAUSE Canada intern in Honduras, about garbage disposal in Iriona and Esparta.

• Landfill Gas Utilization and Biogas Digestion siphon the potent greenhouse gases produced in a landfill and during manure decomposition and convert them into less harmful gases while producing elecriticy for local schools and offices.
• Converting 1 ton of lanfill gas or biogas is the same as preventing some 20 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
• Producing elecrticity locally reduces dependence on imported petrolium-based fuels and firewood.
• Read more...
  

Despite being sites where we dump garbage, landfills are not garbage dumps. In response to environmental concerns raised by garbage dumps in the past, landfills have become highly complex feats of engineering that find ways to (mostly) prevent garbage from contaminating water, air, and soil. Legally, North American landfills must be closely monitored and harmful landfill gas (LFG) migration must at least be controlled. Increasingly, engineers are also finding ways to promote biodegradation in oxygen-poor landfills, to safely sequester the harmful gases produced in landfills, to use that gas to produce relatively clean energy, and to rehabilitate landfill sites into playgrounds, recreation fields, and forests.

Because landfills compile large quantities of organic and inorganic waste without airflow, the processes of degradation produce large quantities of poisonous gas. LFG is generally 60% methane – a greenhouse gas with 23 times the potency of carbon dioxide – while that most notorious of greenhouse gases comprises nearly all of the remaining 40%. The EPA calculates that methane from landfills emitted 730 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2000. That’s equal to the emissions of 132 million passenger vehicles in one year, or all the passenger vehicles in Canada for 9 years! In addition, no landfill is able to contain 100% of its toxic leachate from contaminating nearby water, air, and soil.

Landfills are by no means environmentally or socially benign, but there are ways to minimize their harm. And in the troublesome world of un-recyclable, non-biodegradable solid waste disposal, landfills certainly beat out indiscriminate dumping or incineration.

As long as we’re producing large quantities of persistent waste, landfills are likely to remain the best option for containing the contaminants and perhaps even utilizing that containment to our benefit.

LFG utilization projects are among the leading new technologies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon credit verifiers and monitors, including the United Nation’s Clean Development Mechanism, David Suzuki Foundation, and Pembina Institute, often tout LFG utilization as one of the most effective investments for making real reductions in GHGs in the atmosphere.

That’s because LFG utilization projects take a climate negative – those 730 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent – and turn it into a climate double positive – using methane to produce electricity reduces reliance on traditional non-renewable and heavily polluting energy sources while converting methane into a much less disruptive equivalent volume of carbon dioxide.

Not all landfills are equivalent. They each contain different proportions of different kinds of garbage that produce different gases as they break down differently. For example, the higher the content of organic waste (mostly food stuff and lawn waste) the greater the methane content will be. Additionally, warmer, wetter climates and compressed landfill waste make for higher methane production because of greater rates of oxygen-deprived (anaerobic) decomposition.

In CAUSE Canada’s partner countries – Guatemala, Honduras, and Sierra Leone – open dumping and incineration are the predominant means of waste disposal, resulting in the many health and environmental consequences briefly described above. As processed foods and packaged goods claim an increasing share of local consumption, the characteristics of this waste are changing. Plastics in particular make up an increasing share of garbage, but organic materials remain the most evident products in dumpsites. Further, the rural communities in which CAUSE Canada works are “off grid,” so local electricity almost always comes from high-polluting diesel fuel generators, and the generated power is available only to the wealthiest people.

Plastic recycling and composting programs can reduce the volume of waste diverted to landfills, and LFG utilization systems can use the greenhouse gases still produced to generate cleaner energy locally.

Currently, our partners have the right climate and the right constituents of garbage, but not the right infrastructure, for LFG utilization projects. Appropriate sanitary landfill development needs to take place to keep waste and LFG contained, and engineering work needs to be done to make LFG extraction possible and reliable.