Three reports challenge landfill gas to energy concept

The City of Vancouver -- and all of us citizens -- have a liability to overcome in our pursuit to be the world's Greenest City.

Each year we send nearly a half-million tonnes of mixed garbage to our City-owned landfill in Delta, a practice that produces the potent GHG methane.

To address this vulnerability, the City installed pipes to capture the gas in 1991. The captured gas was "flared" -- burned in an open flame -- so that it emitted CO2 rather than CH4. Then in 2002 the City signed a 20 year agreement with Maxim Power to use the captured gas to produce electricity. The City receives revenues of $200 - 300 thousand per year to offset the cost of maintaining the system. The captured gas produces enough energy each year to power 6,000 homes. (see the 2009 Vancouver Landfill Annual Report and this Solid Waste page from the City's Sustainability website.)

The bad news is the gas that escapes.

Two reports this week call for a policy of methane prevention, rather than end-of-pipe approaches.

The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's Annual Greenhouse Gas Progress Report slammed the landfill-gas-to-energy concept in an interview, saying that "landfills are inherently leaky" and that the "process of using landfills as digesters is faulty."

Also in the news this week is a report released by North Carolina State University that points to contradictory policies that encourage landfilling of biodegradable materials that break down before the gas capture systems are in place.

Twenty years into effort to control the emission of methane from the Vancouver landfill, we still have no way to measure the amount of gas that escapes. Furthermore, the City report admits that fully one-third of the gas that is captured is not put to "beneficial use" to produce electricity, but simply flared.

In his report looking at the full spectrum of GHG emissions, Gord Miller advised his province: "Given methane's significantly higher short term global warming potential, the prevention of fugitive methane emissions from landfills should become a near-term priority."

In January 2010, a report by the Sierra Club called for a shift to methane prevention -- and also pointed to other harmful pollutants in landfill gas.

Zero Waste Vancouver will be pitching in to help the City get more folks composting in their backyards this summer....

Vancouver landfill is no place for organics

Vancouver City Council received a long-awaited report this morning that could open the door to a huge opportunity for our city to shine.

The report was a response to Metro Vancouver's power play a year ago, when out of the blue Commissioner Johnny Carline announced to the astonished politicians on the Waste Management Committee that Metro was abandoning a plan to build a new landfill in the Interior.

Instead, Metro was going to shut down the Vancouver Landfill and build a whole suite of brand new garbage incinerators.

This took the City of Vancouver by surprise. They own the Vancouver Landfill.

Vancouver staff immediately asked the Council of the day to authorize a comprehensive study of the "environmental, financial and regulatory" impacts of Metro's new proposal. The study's findings were the subject of the report made public today.

Not surprisingly the study found that taxpayers will take a hit of $700 million if we have to ship our garbage to Metro Vancouver's new incinerators (cost: up to $130/tonne) instead of burying it in our own facility (cost $20/tonne).

But the report conceded that our landfill currently performs worse than an incinerator, measured measured in greenhouse gas impacts. This is because of the methane produced when we bury food waste and other organic materials underground.

So Vancouver's challenge is this:

Can Mayor Robertson and his Council get behind a massive mobilization to get every last shred of organic material out of the City's landfill? Can we do this by February 2010? Can we come from behind and score Gold in the Zero Waste competition? Now that would be an Olympic legacy we could all benefit from...

Pic: Oakland, California organics program