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Waste & Recycling News, April 20, 2010 By Jim Johnson

Greens, not gas

Almost a dozen environmental groups — including San Francisco’s environmental department — wants to refocus a national program aimed at capturing and using methane from landfills.

The groups want the Landfill Methane Outreach Program operated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to instead focus on keeping organics out of landfills so they don’t have a chance to decompose and create greenhouse gases.

A total of 11 groups, including the U.S. Composting Council, the Sierra Club and the Grassroots Recycling Network, have signed a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson calling for LMOP to be renamed Organics Management Outreach Program and adopt a new focus.

Peter Anderson, executive director of the Center for a Competitive Waste Industry in Madison, Wis., is helping spearhead the push.

Other groups seeking the change are the California Resource Recovery Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Texas Campaign for the Environment, the city of Madison, Recycling Organizations of North America.

“The only reason, really, this is not happening now is that landfills are extremely cheap on the surface,” said Anderson. “They put all the problems, they stuff them into a bag and light a fuse and it’s a ticking time bomb.”

So instead of putting organic waste into landfills, the groups would like to see them instead managed through diversion.

“LMOP’s work has championed landfill-gas-to-energy (LFGTE) by focusing exclusively on the minor gains from displacing electric generation on the utility grid, while disregarding all the fugitive methane – one of the more aggressive greenhouse gases — that escapes in the process,” the letter to Jackson alleges.

LMOP’s strategy of capturing methane once it is created is landfills is “at odds with EPA’s primary missions,” the letter claims. Those goals include waste reduction, land revitalization and recycling, according to the EPA’s Web site, the letter continues.

“Landfill diversion of organics to compost facilities, potentially in combination with controlled anaerobic digestion offers the potential to help achieve these goals,” the letter states. “Diversion should be the focus of EPA’s waste management hierarchy.”

Anderson says the idea is “politically controversial,” but organics diversion is a “very conservative, traditional point of view.”

“There’s no one that can make a statement that this is a radical or unusual thing in terms of substance. I think it’s a very standard thing in terms of diversion,” he said.

While Anderson said he doubts if the issue is a focus of the EPA administrator, he believes the idea will not come as a surprise to those working below her.

“This is not, by itself, a major change. It’s a small thing intended to elicit from the agency whether the new administration has the interest or capacity to bring a breath of fresh air,” he said.

An EPA spokesman did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.