You may not think much about your garbage after throwing it away, but as it decomposes at a dump, it releases climate-warming gases like methane and carbon dioxide (CO2).
Hillsborough County actually harnesses some of these gases to power operations at its Lithia landfill.
Damien Tramel, Hillsborough's solid waste director, said a significant amount of landfill gas is left over and then burned off.
"It will look something similar to an Olympic flare … That's the remaining balance that we can't use to power our existing system that we have there,” Tramel said.
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Now, the county is letting the company Waga Energy turn it into what's called "renewable natural gas," or RNG. It's then sent through RNG pipelines.
“It allows the county to clean and upgrade the landfill gas,” Tramel said. “It can be used as a fuel source in existing natural gas systems — that also allows us to have a practical way to reduce our methane emissions today.”
While clean energy advocates appreciate the county is trying to do something with this natural byproduct of decomposing organic material, they say RNG is just another avenue to fossil fuel emissions.
Brooke Ward, the Florida state director for Food & Water Watch, said calling it "renewable" and "natural" is a deceptive marketing tactic, or “greenwashing.”
"Renewable natural gas is just another form of methane gas, and uses the same sort of leaky, problematic, expensive infrastructure that we end up paying for in the long run,” Ward said.
“We are just locking ourselves in further to the infrastructure and the energy systems that rely on fossil fuels. What we really need to be doing right now is harnessing clean, truly renewable energy sources, like solar energy that are less expensive by far and also aren't creating all of the side effects of greenhouse gases.”
Ward mentioned the extreme heat and strong storms Floridians have been facing in recent years, which have been fueled by the burning of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says on its website, landfill gas is roughly 50% methane and 50% carbon dioxide with a small amount of non-methane organic compounds.
The federal agency describes methane as “a potent greenhouse gas at least 28 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period, per the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report (AR5).”
Tramel acknowledges natural gas isn't a "silver bullet" to the emissions problem, but says it is a reduction strategy.
“We understand that there will be conversations around whether or not this is the right system to actually eliminate or reduce the emissions of the landfill gas ... And we believe it's an important conversation to have,” Tramel said.
"The alternative is to flare it off, which, in our estimation, is worse than what we're currently doing today."
Plus, Hillsborough could earn some cash from Waga Energy in the process — between $1 million and $2 million per year for 20 years, depending on how much landfill gas they’re able to flip.
