EPA announces $4.6 million in grant funding to mitigate landfill emissions

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Washington, has announced $4.6 million in grant funding to five institutions for research to quantify and mitigate emissions from municipal solid waste landfills.

Across the world, communities generate residential, commercial and industrial waste that goes to municipal landfills, which generate gas as the waste degrades. Approximately half of landfill gas emissions are methane and contribute to climate change, EPA says. Landfills also emit other gases that can adversely affect human health and the environment. Due to the health and climate impacts of these emissions, EPA says it is committed to developing and identifying better technologies for measuring and mitigating them.

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“Methane is a potent climate pollutant, which is why improving our understanding of the impacts of methane and other pollution from landfills is crucial to our efforts to address climate change,” says Chris Frey, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “EPA is investing in landfill emissions research to improve the scientific foundation for decisions to protect people and the planet.

“Results from this research will have a global impact on informing approaches to reduce methane emissions and more sustainably manage landfills,” he adds.

Historically, there has been a limited ability to understand and quantify landfill gas emissions, EPA says. These include hazardous air pollutants like benzene, odor nuisance compounds like hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and contaminants of emerging concern like per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). While EPA has developed several landfill emissions estimation tools for public use, it says lack of quantitative data relating to landfills, how they are managed and environmental conditions affecting their emissions has limited the accuracy of these tools. 

According to EPA, the projects will help advance methods for monitoring and quantifying landfill emissions of methane and other pollutants, evaluate strategies for reducing these emissions and improve understanding of how municipal solid waste landfill emissions may change due to future climatic conditions, including extreme weather events. Grantees will use a variety of sensing techniques and modeling approaches to compare current landfill technologies and provide a basis for the future of landfill emissions mitigation and management, the agency says.

The institutions receiving awards are:

• University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, to quantify errors in measurement technologies, guide future technology application, evaluate landfill management practices and more accurately model and predict landfill emissions;
• University of Miami, Miami, to improve and demonstrate the use of lower-cost air quality sensors to map pollution distribution, estimate emission fluxes and evaluate strategies to reduce methane emissions;
• University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, to demonstrate and standardize modeling and mapping methods for quantifying methane emissions and other health impacting gases released from landfills;
• University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, to assess the performance and feasibility tradeoffs of integrating measurements across platforms to assess emissions and mitigation of methane and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from landfills; and
• University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, to develop and demonstrate an innovative approach to more cost effectively monitor and quantify emissions and to quantify the benefits from a range of mitigation and landfill management methodologies.

The grant announcement follows an open letter to EPA published yesterday by 56 locals officials from 18 states. The letter urges the agency to phase out organic waste from landfills to combat climate change caused by increased methane emissions.