Last month, Tom Koutroulis, director of Orange County Waste & Recycling, signed off on a grant request that he hopes could fundamentally change how America handles one of the oldest but least understood drivers of global warming: garbage.
It isn’t a huge ask as these things go; $25 million from a $5 billion fund overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. The money would pay for what Koutroulis calls the “Smart Landfill System,” essentially a cluster of new technologies (specially equipped drones, 24/7 sensors and the like) aimed at improving the way his agency measures and tracks the methane that belches out of the three big active landfills in Orange County.
But if the request sounds like it’s limited to a few local garbage piles, its impact, in Koutroulis’ view, could be much bigger — modernizing an already-complex world (landfill management) where change happens slowly and is often met with strong resistance.
It also dovetails with his even bigger goal, to improve public health by slowing the rise (literally) of a particularly nasty cause of global warming.
“What we’re proposing would be a disruptor,” Koutroulis said.
“If they (the EPA) give us this money, our system will probably be the first of its kind used at this scale,” he added. “It could change the entire industry.”
Yet that still might not be enough.
Even if Koutroulis’ idea works as he hopes, and the EPA eventually requires that some version of a Smart Landfill strategy be implemented at the 1,700-plus active landfills around the country, a growing number of scientists believe the problem he’s hoping to combat – the amount of methane sent into the atmosphere from landfills – is far more dire than previously believed.
New mystery
Methane is the gas created from the decomposition of organic matter, which means lot of human activities and natural events can generate it. Cows, for example, are well-known methane leakers. So are oil and gas refineries, rice fields,…
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