Landfills could be an environmental asset

In landfills, about 70 percent of carbon from paper and more than 97 percent from wood remains locked away under the ground, scientists claim

January 21, 1999
Web posted at: 1:30 PM EST

By Environmental News Network staff

(ENN) -- Could landfills actually help curb greenhouse gas emissions? They could, according to research from the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. In fact, landfill sites could soon become environmental assets, scientists say.

According to an article in the Jan. 23 issue of New Scientist Magazine, burying waste paper and wood permanently locks away large amounts of carbon that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and speed up global warming.

The U.S. now says it wants to count landfills as "carbon sinks" under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Ironically, this could lead to countries shoveling away as much carbon waste as they can in landfills -- traditionally viewed as environmentally unsound -- so they can burn more fossil fuels.

Jessie Micales and Ken Skog of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory have found that although wood products contain high amounts of carbon, the wood never actually rots when put in a landfill. Instead, about 70 percent of carbon from paper and more than 97 percent from wood remains locked away under the ground, the scientists claim. They calculated that landfills in the U.S. lock up 28 million tons of carbon a year -- equivalent to two percent of annual U.S. carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.

At the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Geneva last week, government officials suggested that landfills could be put in the same category as forests -- qualified as carbon sinks. These carbon sinks could offset emissions released by countries. This would make it easier for the country to meet its Kyoto target of cutting emissions seven percent by 2010.

However, before this is considered, scientists will need to track the fate of carbon in timber all the way from the forest floor to paper mill or furniture factory to landfill.

"The U.S. position is that we want to treat the carbon cycle as comprehensively as possible. As a consequence, accounting for landfill is important," says Bill Hohenstein, an expert on the issue at the EPA in Washington, D.C. Perversely from the viewpoint of many environmentalists, this could encourage countries to bury more of their waste in landfills.

"It's a load of rubbish," says Tony Juniper, policy and campaigns director of Friends of the Earth in London. "You can see manufacturers using this as an argument for making more paper and recycling less." He says if you examine emissions from the paper industry through paper's life cycle, including forestry and manufacturing, the equation doesn't look so good.

The controversy could come to a head at an intergovernmental policy workshop in the U.S. this spring. The workshop will discuss the rules for extending national inventories of greenhouse gases to include the gases that growing forests take from the atmosphere and those that deforestation releases. A key debate will be how to account for forest products, such as paper, fiber and wood, that lock up carbon for long periods. Depending on how the rules are drawn up, the piles of waste paper dumped in landfills could soon be judged as valuable to the climate as a pristine rainforest.

For more information, contact Claire Bowles, New Scientist, email: claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk.

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