THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Trucks arrive at the brown hill like an army of ants, then crawl up, whipping dust into the sky before dumping trash unceremoniously at the top. What happens later sets the Buenos Aires landfill apart from most others in South America: Planet-warming methane leaking from the trash is turned into power.

Norte III -- a 1,200-acre site whose garbage hills draw the eye in table-flat Buenos Aires -- recently activated a new power station that runs on gas piped from under the hill through tree-trunk-sized black tubes. The five megawatts generated by landfill operator Ceamse may be enough to run only several thousand homes, but they represent a victory in a global campaign against methane that's gathering momentum at the United Nations climate summit in Scotland.

Methane rising from the hill known as module D became a global hot spot, with rotting food creating a plume so dense that it could be seen from space, according to a June image from geoanalytics firm GHGSat. [...]

Landfill gas accounts for a fifth of methane releases, according to a report this year by the Climate & Clean Air Coalition and the UN Environment Programme. Countries including Mexico, France and Thailand are increasingly capturing it to feed power production, and in the U.S. around 500 trash dumps produce energy. As part of the redoubled effort to contain leaks, the U.S. is aiming to capture 70% of landfill gas emissions, President Joe Biden said at COP26.

Tweet   @brothersjudd