That Landfill You’re Ignoring? It Oozes Methane
Dumping our garbage — especially our food waste — into the ground is bad for the Earth’s atmosphere.
Come for the trash, stay for the methane.
Photographer: Ty Wright/BloombergEvery year, Americans dump over 250 million metric tons of garbage into landfills, where it seems to magically disappear from our lives. In reality, our trash either gets fossilized or digested by vast populations of methane-emitting bacteria.
Over a 20-year horizon, every pound of methane emitted has 80 times the heat-trapping power of the same amount of carbon dioxide. (CO2 lasts much longer in the atmosphere.) And our country’s 1,200 landfills are producing more methane than we realized, according to group of scientists who recently used an aerial remote sensing system to fly over 200 of them. They measured methane emissions 1.4 times what had been officially recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency. The journal Science published their findings in March.