Waste not, want not?

Coming to a landfill near you! This is a nice map showing where your household waste might go to - it includes waste-to-power recycling sites as well as landfills.

Overall 570+ such sites in the U.K…….

Which brings us to the matter of methane from waste - methane is generated from landfill waste, accelerated by anaerobic conditions when a landfill is progressively or fully ‘capped’.

The IEA has identified methane from waste as a significant global source:

‘Energy’ in this case is I believe from all industrial sources + transportation.

If you dig into the IEA data base, you can see specific estimates for the U.K. in which Waste is identified as a significant, arguable major, source.

This is somewhat in contrast to what is officially reported for the U.K. as exemplified by reporting for 1990-2020 which shows methane emissions from Waste plummeting - there is no other word for it….

How can this be?

I suggest that we’re bumping into that old adage “You can’t MANAGE what you can’t MEASURE”! I’m guessing that we don’t have in the U.K. the airborne measurements of landfills that have been done in California for example (I can provide a reference in Comments).

Please correct me if I’m wrong!