Municipal Waste-to-Energy Facilities Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 1990 Polymers, Laminations & Coatings Conference Proceedings

lt has been postulated that global warming will result from increased quantities of certain gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Some of these gases occur naturally and some are manmade. Also, gases some last longer in the atmosphere and contribute more on a per molecule basis to the global warming trend. The manmade gases which cause the greatest concern are chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), and carbon dioxide (CO4).

These are known as the “greenhouse gases,” and In significant quantities, some of them, especially CO2 and CH4 are generated by the disposal of municipal solid waste in landfills and Waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities, as well as the recycling of municipal solid waste.

Because landfilling and WTE account for 90 percent of the disposal of the 160 million tons of MSW generated in the US annually, these two strategies also account for most of the contribution to global warming from MSW disposal. Recycling also generates greenhouse gases, but the relative contribution of these gases from recycling is proportional to the role of recycling in MSW disposal which is small.

The investigation and conclusions presented in this paper were stimulated by the question: From the global warming perspective, is it better to bury our MSW in landfills or burn it in modern waste-to-energy facilities? The following analyses estimate the quantities of greenhouse gases generated by both disposal strategies and convert the gases to equivalent CO, in order to derive a ratio of global warming effectiveness between the two alternatives.