Landfill Gas to Energy

Green Coalition estimates that Redwood Landfill is one of Marin’s single largest, if not the largest, emitter of methane gas. Methane is 23x more powerful a greenhouse gas than even CO2. The gas arises from decomposing food and yard waste, “organic” materials dumped and rotting at Redwood. Some or most of the methane gas generated simply leaks into the air; the rest is captured, burned and flared into the atmosphere as CO2.

The world’s leading climate scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the respected international body set up to assess global warming, sharply disagree with claims by the U.S. waste industry and the Bush Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that landfill gas-capture rates are more than 90 percent. The IPCC reported in 2007 that at best the capture rate is less than 20 percent over the life of the landfill.

While we applaud Waste Management Inc. for many of the Landfill Gas-to-Energy (LFGTE) projects around the country, the Green Coalition believes that linkage of LFGTE to Redwood Landfill’s proposed expansion in unacceptable. Future methane recovery and use should no longer be held hostage to WMI’s profit enhancement and fuzzy promises. WMI should start immediately planning an LFGTE project for in-ground organics at the Landfill.

Equally important, WMI should commit to eliminating organics from the wastestream going into the Landfill. Organics should be diverted, not landfilled, then composted and the methane totally captured and used for fuels or electricity with state-of-the-art technology, as at WMI sites elsewhere. Marin’s Community Choice Aggregation JPA, when launched, would be one potential local buyer of the methane. And high-quality compost will find ready markets in Marin’s agriculture, landscaping and gardening. San Francisco and Alameda County already have working food/green waste diversion and composting programs. Why not Marin?

Sonoma County’s Water Agency (SCWA) authored a report “Trash to Cash: Feasibility of a Landill Gas-to-Energy Project at Redwood Landfill” (June 13, 2007). This report shows LFGTE is economically feasible but it states WMI’s issues surrounding LFTGE at Redwood. Section 2.2, under Project Status (pages 4 & 5) discusses Permit Compliance, Grid Connection, and Internal Project Support.

View Report

Link to ABC7 TV story on how green waste is being counted as “recycled” but it really isn’t which inflates Marin’s professed recycled rate by 15-20 percent.

Link