Remember the banana peels, apple cores and leftover pizza you recently threw in the garbage? Today, your food waste, and your neighbors’, is emitting climate-warming greenhouse gases as it decomposes in a nearby municipal landfill.
Buried food scraps and yard waste at 51 dumps across Colorado generate an amount of methane equivalent to driving 1 million gasoline-powered cars for a year. About 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a period of 20 years, methane accounts for 11% of global emissions that scientists say are warming the atmosphere and contributing to more intense and severe weather, wildfires and drought.
Landfills are the third-largest source of methane pollution in Colorado, after agriculture and fossil fuel extraction. Draft methane rules released last month by the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment would, for the first time, require some dump operators to measure and quantify methane releases and to fix leaks. The proposal mandates that waste managers install a gas collection system if their dump generates a certain amount of the climate-warming gas.
It also addresses loopholes in federal law that allow waste to sit for five years before such systems are required — even though science has shown that half of all food waste decays within about three-and-a-half years. The draft rule surpasses U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards in the amount of landfill area operators must monitor for emissions. It’s set to be heard by the state’s Air Quality Control Commission in August.
Proposed regulations require the elimination of open gas flares — burning emissions directly into the atmosphere — and urge the use of biocovers and biofilters, which rely on bacteria to break down gases. The 70-page draft also calls for more routine and thorough monitoring of a dump surface with advanced technologies like satellites, which recently recorded large plumes of methane escaping from a Denver-area landfill.
To read the entire story, visit The Colorado Sun.