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One Person's Trash...Another Person's Energy

One person's trash can be another person's treasure-literally. In Orange County last week, the Board of County Commissioners initiated an innovative program to generate energy from the landfill. They're looking at siphoning off landfill gas to create electricity and heat.
Robeson County, earlier this year, began a public-private partnership to harness their landfill gas for use at a proposed ethanol plant.

These are great opportunities to turn something bad into something good.

Here's how it works: Landfills, stuffed to the rim with rotting garbage, give off methane and other gases. In most communities, of course, these gases are allowed to simply escape into the atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming. Methane is most worrisome because it's one of the worst greenhouse gases; it's many times more potent than car exhaust, for example.

The plan is to capture the landfill gas, pump it to a small energy generation facility, and create electricity. In addition, the process that creates electricity also creates excess heat, which can be used to heat nearby buildings. So, the community can get two bangs for our one buck.
These 'garbage-to-energy' projects, like the ones in Orange and Robeson Counties, represent the tip of the iceberg --or the tip of the trashheap--in terms of what we could be doing here in North Carolina. North Carolina is poised to become the first state in the southeast to seriously address climate change. Passage of some of the bills before the legislature will create a climate of opportunity for addressing global warming.

Creating energy from a waste product--like landfill gas--saves money and reduces the emission of greenhouse gases. By looking at climate change as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, we can accomplish several goals at once: reducing air pollution, addressing global warming, exploiting economic opportunity in a new sector, and saving money.

One person's trash really can be another person's treasure.