Trash to treasure: the future of landfill biogas in Texas
By Brooklyn Rodgers
In recent years the modern environmental movement has increasingly popularized mobilization against climate change by means of individual action. The individual choice to reduce personal food waste highlights the effect of this phenomenon: a 2019 study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that “eight-in-ten Americans (80%) report that they reduce their food waste for environmental reasons”.
The same study showed that of those who make efforts to reduce their food waste, nearly half believe that their actions make a “big” difference for the environment. These findings reveal the saliency of the popular perception that individual action, at least in the case of food waste, is effective in light of larger goals of the environmental movement. This perception is one that manages to be problematic despite its social, psychological, and arguably minuscule, environmental benefits.
The reasoning, however, for these choices is not entirely unsound. Individual choices to reduce food waste stem from our understanding that this waste contributes to emissions in unique ways. When food is not eaten, the sum of the emissions from the processes necessary to its production (think land-use, transportations, supply chains) is effectively “wasted”. On top of that, the decomposition of physical food waste in landfills results in further emission of greenhouse gases, particularly methane.
Methane is especially harmful not only because its impact as a greenhouse gas is 25 times greater than that of the same amount of CO2 over a 100 year period, but because its presence leads to the formation of tropospheric ozone, which poses an additional threat to human health often in the form of respiratory problems.
Despite the reality of the industrial sized food waste problems we face, environmental experts like Robert Heele make the case for the importance of not only individual choices but the environmentally conscious choices of Americans in particular. Given the United States’ current position as the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, it makes sense that action to mitigate climate change ought to be encouraged in its various forms, including the mobilization of individuals by environmental groups to make environmentally conscious choices like reducing food waste.
The largely symbolic debate on whether individual action in the face of the climate problem can or even should be measured and encouraged reveals the alarming misconceptions of the debate itself and necessitates a reframing of the conversation as a whole. Namely, the hyper fixation on the individual’s choice whether to save or not save the environment through microscopic actions erases much of the context around meaningful environmental action.
Your decision on whether or not to throw out your uneaten takeout does not exist in a vacuum of pure environmental and moral symbolism, but rather in the context of the many emissions causing processes related to producing your food itself. A crucial and lesser recognized factor is that your choices exist in the context of programs that exist to mitigate the effects of food waste when you ultimately end up foregoing your takeout.
Landfill Methane Outreach Programs (LMOPs) are a lesser-known solution to this food waste issue. These programs aim to deter methane emissions from landfills through the recovery of landfill gas (LFG) composed largely of the methane that results from the decomposition of organic waste and represents a primary concern of environmentalists.
LMOPs work cooperatively with local waste officials to not only capture this LFG to prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere, but to process the biogas to use as a renewable energy resource to generate electricity, evaporate landfill leachate, and offset the use of natural gas (EPA).
In highlighting the importance of American choices to contribute to a more sustainable world, we must also acknowledge the choices available to individual states and communities to pick up the slack where individuals cannot. Texas is a unique case study for observing the efficacy of these growing LMOPs given that the state has the second-largest state population in the US and one that was responsible for producing nearly 36.8 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) in 2019 alone.
Of the 198 landfills active in the state of Texas which are responsible for MSW disposal, there are currently 25 LMOPs in operation. Despite the relatively small number of these landfill gas treatment plants in Texas, in 2019 these projects collected and processed nearly 32.4 billion cubic feet of gas and generated and sold 361 million kilowatt-hours of power from this gas alone.
The potential for the practical use of landfill gas is immense, with it already being in use to power manufacturing industries, prisons, and hospitals. Beyond this utility, Figure 1 shows the potential of these projects to effectively reduce methane emissions which turn into ozone in the urban, highly populated counties where they are implemented.
In each of the graphs representing large, populous individual Texas counties with LMOPs in Figure 1, there is an observable decline over time in either the ozone high or ozone average. In the Hidalgo, Dallas, and Denton counties in particular there was a significant decline in the presence of ozone during or soon after the start year of these novel LMOPs.
Even in counties without a sharp decline on or after an LMOP start date, we still witness a relatively consistent decline in ozone over time. This trend strengthens the finding that LMOPs have are effective in reducing methane emissions and resulting ozone formation, becuase we would expect to see both of these gasses increase consistent with the rapid population growth of Texas’s largest counties.
In contrast, Figure 2 showcases individual graphs for Texas counties with LMOPs that have a population of less than 400,000. In these smaller counties, it is more difficult to draw conclusions on the effect of LMOPs on emissions. However, we still do not see any consistent increase in ozone over time. This may suggest that the effects of LMOPs on reducing methane emissions and resultantly ozone may be more evident in counties with large populations where landfill waste is a more significant contributor to overall emissions.
Additionally, recent research has shown that in rural counties in the US, households not only tend to produce less food waste in general, but that composting waste at home is much more prevalent. Composting reduces the volume of food waste in landfills which ultimately reduces methane and the formation of ozone. These actions taken by residents of rural counties may reduce the overall contribution of landfills to emissions in these counties and thus inhibit the ability to detect changes in ozone levels from the presence of LMOPs alone.
This data provides an empirical basis for the statewide and national expansion of these projects based on their clear efficacy, especially in populous areas. Further research on LMOPs across the US should address the distinction between populous and less populous counties in order to understand the impact of LMOPs based on their location.
These findings highlight the importance of further research on LMOPs in order to increase overall awareness of these effective, but lesser-known programs. The effect of this research is not to say that waste reduction by individuals is not significant in light of the efforts of programs like LMOPs which essentially “correct” our wasteful actions, but rather to highlight the need for context in placing weight on individual decisions to save the environment.
Food waste is an issue that many Americans are interested in and willing to take action on. However, individual action can manifest itself beyond the food waste choices many Americans are currently making. When understanding the complexity of our food waste problem in particular the awareness of programs like LMOPs is extremely relevant.
Environmental mobilization that forces individual action by placing the burden of guilt on individuals to consistently make environmentally conscious choices and resultingly demoralize them when they fail is simply not effective. Education on the complexity of the environmental issues we face is necessary to foster meaningful environmental action. In the case of food waste, environmentalists could harness individuals’ contribution by educating them on post consumer choice programs like LMOPs, and encouraging them to lobby their elected officials for the creation of these highly effective programs in their areas.
