Climate Change Impacts

The infrastructure for dealing with solid waste has climate change impacts at these stages: 

• When waste is being transported for collection, recycling and disposal. As landfills close and finding locations for new ones becomes more difficult, hauling distances increase.
• When waste is put in landfills to decompose, a process that produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
• When waste is incinerated; this produces carbon dioxide as a by-product.
• When materials such as metals and plastics are discarded rather than recycled, so that new materials must be used to make replacement products. The energy intensity and greenhouse gas emissions related to producing new materials is usually higher than that of recycled or recovered materials.

Actions

• Reducing the amount of solid waste generated eliminates impacts that would be associated with collecting and disposing of it.
• Recycling of materials — including metal, many plastics, paper and construction materials — saves space in landfills. It usually allows replacement products to be made with less energy than if they were being made from virgin materials. Recycling also eliminates impacts related to growing or mining the replacement materials.
• Recycling of organic wastes, such as food waste, by composting can avoid the production of landfill methane, can provide and enhance carbon sequestration, and can address other environmental issues by enhancing soil quality and fertility.
• Product stewardship programs get manufacturers and industries rethinking how products and packaging are designed and managed, so that valuable materials can be reused as much as possible, and then recycled into something else.
• Zero Waste Initiatives aim to ultimately reduce waste to zero by extending the current ideas of recycling to form closed loops, where virtually all materials are reused.
  • For example, the City of Albuquerque has committed to a zero waste target and is planning to eliminate its landfill in 2030.
• Landfill gas capture  involves collecting methane emissions from a landfill and using them to generate heat or power.
  • For example, the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, harvests methane from its landfill and generates electricity for more than 2,500 homes. The plant also supplies heat and carbon dioxide to a nearby commercial greenhouse.
• Energy recovery from combustion or waste-to-energy solid waste combustion.