Landfill gas to Energy

Before I talk about landfill gas as part of our energy solution, I want to share two facts with you. Firstly, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. has 3,091 active landfills and over 10,000 old municipal landfills. Secondly, INFORM found that 179,000 waste collection, waste transfer, and recycling vehicles are on US roads today -- 91% of them diesel-fueled and most of them old.I will connect the dots between these two facts later on. What is landfill gas and how can it play a role in American energy production? Landfill gas is renewable natural gas that is released from decomposing waste at a landfill. Here's how it works.

Now how do the two facts I mentioned earlier tie in together? Here's two quick facts about garbage trucks

• An average garbage truck travels 25,000 miles annually, gets less than 3 miles per gallon, and uses approximately 8,600 gallons of fuel each year.
• Over 40% of garbage trucks are over 10 years old, making it the oldest fleet in the US.

Interestingly enough, waste management businesses can run their entire fleet of refuse trucks on the natural gas generated by landfills. 179,000 garbage trucks times 8,600 gallons of fuel each year on average makes for total oil consumption of 1,539,400,000 1.54 billion gallons. Replace all of those vehicles within the next twenty years with natural gas running refuse trucks and you can seriously clean up the air and put a massive dent in American oil consumption. A prime example of a company that is doing this right is Waste Management with their Altamont Landfill in California. They bring in about 5,000 tons of trash a day, which makes 13,000 gallons of liquified natural gas, LNG, and use that to power the natural gas trucks they have in their fleet. Environmentally, this is consistent with on-site power production, where homeowners and businesses rely on themselves for their needs and not anyone else. In closing, here's a video which explains the whole process in its entirety.