Aerial monitoring finds they emit methane at levels at least 40 percent higher than previously reported to the EPA.
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. A landfill is a place of perpetual motion, where mountains of garbage rise in days and crews race to contain the influx of ever more trash. Amid the commotion, an invisible gas often escapes unnoticed, warming the planet and harming our health: methane. On Thursday, the climate-data sleuths at Carbon Mapper published a study in Science that shows U.S.
4 times, and sometimes as much as 2.7 times, larger than those reported to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Although federal guidelines require these facilities to track emissions and provide that data to the EPA, current reporting and monitoring methods just aren’t up to snuff, according to the study. Most operators report an estimate, using EPA guidelines, calculated from the amount of trash they take in, not from measured data.
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