ISWA comments
Greg Vogt
ISWA Managing Director Greg Vogt contends that new trends in waste management are all part of the global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Our world of waste is continuing its trend of making meaningful, positive steps towards more sustainable practices. And the climate change issue is driving this trend, with its focus extending readily to waste management practices, particularly at landfills. This extension is commonly attributed to direct greenhouse gas emissions reductions through the installation of comprehensive landfill gas (primarily methane) emissions collection and flaring systems. For example, a recent news story reported that a sanitary landfill in Buenos Aires, Argentina had installed the first enclosed biogas flare of its kind in the country. The more such mechanisms are installed at landfills around the world, the more our industry can play its part in stalling the effects of waste on climate change.
What is of interest is the degree to which other waste management practices and existing technologies may contribute to greenhouse gas reductions as well. Replacing biogas flares with energy utilization projects (such as electricity generation, direct use to a boiler, or production of pipeline quality gas), or replacing an existing biogas-driven engine or turbine with more efficient units will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As indicated recently in Waste Management & Research (February 2008), our research community is determining how to attribute success in GHG control when applying other practices. Such practices include:
- employing biologically active covers atop landfills and dump sites to oxidize methane emission
- emphasis on waste reduction and basic recycling programmes
- energy efficiency advances for waste-to-energy facilities
- hazardous waste incineration
- front-end mechanical–biological treatment processes with ‘back-end’ anaerobic digestion
- soil amendments/improvements as a result of compost derived from waste management systems.
This last finding, specific to composting, seems intuitive and may lend weight to support for the addition of waste-derived compost to agricultural soils – whether from composting of source-separated leaves, grass, vegetative matter, food wastes, or as derived from mixed waste processing systems. Based on the low number of operating composting facilities compared with actual waste generation, the waste management sector has the potential to deliver enormous quantities of compost to the marketplace. Possible benefits include mitigating methane and nitrous oxide emissions while increasing the amount of carbon stored and sequestered, resulting in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Such sequestration has been supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific groups.
Some may argue that the benefits of these other waste management practices need to be better understood, and may require significant examination to yield acceptable measurement protocols. However, most of the practices make sense for multiple reasons and are part of the overall improvements taking place in an often ignored field. The message is that the waste management industry is moving in the right direction to tackle the global problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Greg Vogt is Managing Director of ISWA and ISWA Editor of Waste Management World
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