Waste Management taps clean power from garbage - Reuters

Source: Reuters

Waste Management taps clean power from garbage

Wed Jun 27, 4:21 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Waste Management Inc. said on
Wednesday it will speed up its tapping of gas from
rotting garbage to generate clean power from 60 landfills
over five years.

Waste Management will bring turbines to the landfills to
generate more than 700 megawatts of power a year, or
enough power for about 700,000 homes, the company
said. The power will also earn the company renewable
energy credits it can bank or sell for its projects in
states that have such programs.

Alternative energy is growing amid high oil and natural
gas prices and concern about global warming. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency says about 425 U.S.
landfills tap gas for power and an additional 560 dumps
hold promising supplies of the fuel.

-snip-

Rotting garbage produces a gas that is about half
methane, which has about 20 times the heat-trapping
potential of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
Most landfills simply vent the gas to the atmosphere
and those dumps are the largest source of human-
related methane emissions in the country, according
to the Environmental Protection Agency.

-snip-

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070627/sc_nm/garbage_wastemanagement_dc

that have their own dumps may follow suit.

There was a plan to do this at the closed Pelham Bay landfill in the Bronx 25 years ago. I don't think anything came of it, though.

One other note that I'd like to make: Organic decomposition is an exothermic reaction, so there's some heat being generated down there as well. I'm not sure if it's practical to capture that heat and put it to use, but it's definitely there.

I read just a couple of days ago that there are presently 425 landfill methane recovery/generation sites in the US, and about another 600 'viable' sites. The recovered gas has about half the heating value of natural gas.

The technology may not be new, but the economics
of cleaning up a significant GHG source make it
interesting.