Garbage In - Garbage Generated Greenhouse Gasses Out

Garbage in, garbage out?

Not if you live anywhere near my neck of the woods where, it seems, we are dedicated to shipping our environmental problems elsewhere; at the cost of many tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Garbage disposal has been an issue for mankind for as long as mankind has existed.  Few things make an archeologist lick his or her lips more than the discovery of a new midden with its treasure trove of broken kitchen utensils, shells, bones, and other stuff even the poorest of our ancestors tossed.

When I was young, most “garbage” was disposed of in either private dumps or in the town dump.  My dad, and many others, cheated the archeologists of the future by picking through the local dump for items someone else might have seen fit to throw away but we could use.  “Waste not, want not,” was the rule of the day in our house.

In the modern era nearly everything has become disposable.  I don’t know if that is bad or good but, it is a fact of life.  We, especially in America but, elsewhere as well, create mountains of garbage as we live out our lives.

How we dispose of that garbage says a lot about how we view the environment around us.  Is garbage a resource as it was to my father's generation or, is garbage waste; to be filed away somewhere for the archeologists of the future to ponder over?

In my home town, the pop-environmentalists have had their way so we do all we can to assure our garbage disposal issues are resolved by the “out of sight, out of mind” approach to problem solving;  “Got a problem? Ship it somewhere else and put it in a hole so I don’t have to look at it.”

The problem is, of course, a “Ship it somewhere else and put it in a hole so I don’t have to look at it,” approach results, in our case as least, in tens of tons of unnecessary diesel emissions to the atmosphere, an increase in fossil fuel use as electricity that could have been created through the incineration of non reusable garbage is not produced and, perhaps worst of all, the creation of an attitude that as long as we can ship a problem elsewhere there is no problem. 

In my community, garbage is collected then taken to a central location, compacted, containerized and loaded aboard freight trains for shipment. 

Containers loaded with garbage await shipment; out of sight, out of mind

It is an interesting aside that with few exceptions, manufactured goods cannot be shipped in or out of the community by train but, in order to avoid handling our own garbage we’ve managed to find a way to get the containers onto trains.

The garbage is then shipped across the mountains bordering coastal Washington to one of two destinations a couple of hundred miles out of sight where it is off loaded and dumped into a hole in the ground.

We are so proud of getting our garbage out of sight and out of mind in Whatcom County that we, as part of a report on greenhouse gas emissions in the county done under the auspices of our local Northwest Clean Air Agency and a pop environmental group of governments called ICLEI, proclaim:

“The greenhouse gas emissions generated from waste are dependent on the type of waste being disposed of and the configuration of the landfill where waste is disposed. Two processes usually occur in a landfill. First, the waste does not completely decompose, which causes some of the carbon that would have been released as CO2 to actually be sequestered in the landfill. Second, because of the lack of oxygen in the landfill, the decomposing matter is released as methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than CO2. If methane is not captured or burned, the landfill is a net source of greenhouse gas emissions. And in these cases, waste disposal can be a significant part of a community’s climate pollution profile. Some solutions include capturing the methane to produce energy or burning it to convert it back to the less potent CO2.”

Whatcom County’s waste is sent to Columbia Ridge and Roosevelt Landfill, sanitary landfills with methane recovery factors between 56% and 80%. This means that the majority of what decomposes in the landfill and is released as methane gas is captured (or “recovered”) at the landfill. In the County’s case, the net result is that a little bit more carbon equivalent is buried and trapped in the landfill than is added to the atmosphere. This effect explains why eCO2 emissions from our waste sector are reported as negative.”

Whatcom County is to be emulated world wide.  Who else can gather garbage, transport it by train for hundreds of miles, throw it into a hole in the ground and END UP WITH NEGATIVE EMISSIONS?

But wait.  We are proud of burning thousands, maybe tens of thousands of gallons of diesel to get our garbage to a place where we can produce methane from it but, happy days, we only emit 20 – 44% of that methane to the atmosphere?

We used to incinerate our garbage in our community, making electricity in the process.  The result?  Sure, carbon is emitted, but not concentrated in the form of methane!  And, fossil fuel emissions resulting from producing electricy using coal or gas fired plants are avoided.

And think about what the pop enviros don’t consider here.  Any strategy for disposal that can be utilized 200 miles away can be utilized in the community.  So where is the consideration of the emissions caused by a 200 mile trip to get the resource out of sight and out of mind?  Or is that kind of like the local city’s being lauded for purchasing 108% of its power from green energy sources?