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Across the United States, landfills are accumulating trash faster than materials can decompose. In the nearly 2,000 landfills in the US, food waste contributes over 50 percent of fugitive methane emissions from municipal solid waste landfills, those invisible plumes of potent greenhouse gas emissions that seep out of landfills and into the atmosphere.

Landfills rank as the third-largest human-generated source of methane emissions in the US, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While diverting trash altogether would be the preferred outcome for pollution reduction, about 500 landfills across the country have turned to a novel way of combating pollution from the waste that is ending up in landfills: capturing the gas emitted from organic materials and transforming it into electricity.

“Methane is already in our environment today. You either use it or lose it,” says Mike Bakas, alluding to the methane that is wasted if it’s not captured. Bakas leads all landfill projects and renewable natural gas business at Ameresco, a company that designs, builds and operates renewable energy plants for landfills around the US.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, about 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat. Capturing it removes the gas’s ability to stimulate the greenhouse effect that comes with its infiltration into our atmosphere.

Landfills that utilize Landfill Gas-to-Energy (LFGTE) systems, which allow for the conversion of methane to energy, are equipped with infrastructure designed to collect the gas, often encased with a layer of clay or synthetic membrane to prevent gas from escaping into the atmosphere. Once collected, the methane can be utilized in one of a few ways, as electricity to use on-site or feed into the local power grid, or as natural gas.

The amount of energy generated through LFGTE projects varies widely depending on the size and age of the landfill, the composition of waste and the efficiency of the gas collection system. 

One massive landfill that spans 629 acres in Virginia produces enough landfill gas (LFG) to create 70,000 megawatt hours of energy each year — that’s enough to power about 6,700 homes for a year, based on the average US household’s annual electricity consumption. 

While most landfills using LFGTE are actively collecting waste, not all of them are. “We’ve got a landfill that’s been shut down for about 10 years and we still have another 10 to 20 years of gas in it,” says Bakas.

Puente Hills in California is the largest LFGTE program in the country, producing enough energy to power about 70,000 homes. Before the Puente Hills landfill closed in 2013, it was the largest landfill in the US, spanning 700 acres and reaching a whopping height of 500 feet above ground level.

These types of projects first came on the scene in the mid-1970s, and experienced a big rise in popularity in the ’90s — largely due to the fact that, in 1994, the EPA began encouraging landfill operators to develop LFGTE projects through its Landfill Methane Outreach Program. 

So why isn’t every landfill owner taking advantage of its latent treasure trove of energy? Funding, mostly.

According to Bakas, LFGTE systems can cost between $10 million and $100 million to implement. 

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided tax deductions for landfills to install these systems, but there are still limitations that prohibit smaller landfills from being able to finance LFGTE. Specifically, the IRA didn’t explicitly permit the use of Investment Tax Credits (ITC) for LFGTE projects, something Bakas says the industry is pushing for, as it would go a long way in helping smaller landfill projects that wouldn’t otherwise be economically feasible. 

There are also caveats embedded among the IRA’s tax offerings that restrict landfills from receiving any of these benefits unless its owner owns both the landfill collection system and the energy processing plant, which, according to Bakas, is often not the case.

“So we need the treasury to come out and say, you can own either one or both, which would free us up to invest money in the equipment we need to do it,” says Bakas.

And supporting these projects isn’t just good for our air quality and atmosphere, but potentially for our pockets too. The dollars put into building these systems can be returned through the sale of electricity. And in some regions, landfill gas projects can generate renewable energy credits, which can be sold to utilities needing to meet renewable energy standards, providing an additional revenue stream.

But these projects aren’t always profitable, and some may not have the capacity to ever be.

“To the extent that the site is economic, which I don’t think it’s a guarantee that it is, operators would probably look at how much [energy] can we produce … and how close are we to where the energy can be used?” says Daniel Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Bresette says that if a plant is processing landfill gas for electricity, as opposed to other types of energy, the plant may be able to do so with existing equipment, and with less concern for where the landfill is located. This is because the electricity can be fed directly into the energy grid, rather than needing to be transferred off-site to be processed.

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The EPA estimates that a project that requires the installation of a new capture system would cost about $8.5 million to install and maintain, and would cost about another $3.5 million over the course of its 15-year lifespan. That number would drop dramatically for a project that doesn’t require the support of a supplemental capture facility to process the LFG. It would also drop if tax credits, carbon credits or on-site electricity are utilized.

Landfills of a certain size are required by the Clean Air Act to install and operate gas collection systems. For those that don’t meet sizing requirements, the industry is pushing for more government support.

“If the treasury confirms that we can use the ITC tax credits under the IRA towards these projects, then those smaller projects that were not economic might very well become economic,” says Bakas.

The post Could a Landfill Power Your Home? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

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There are many mundane moments in our lives that unexpectedly become pivotal.

One of those for me is when my Russian teacher told me that there is no word for privacy in Russian.

It’s on a long list of words that have no equivalent in Russian, but this particular word stuck with me. 

The words private – chastniy or personal – lichniy do exist in Russian, but the idea of privacy, a private, secretive realm each person has a right to, does not.

I realized the whole concept of privacy wasn’t organic to contemporary Russian society, which had been shaped by almost a century of communal living. But more than that, it made me think about the culture I had been raised in: was privacy so central to Britishness that I had assumed it was universal? Or was this something specific to the Russian mindset?

It was instances like these that made me want to study languages: moments that pull back the curtain on your own assumptions about the world. 

So I decided I needed to study something that was as different as possible to the culture around me and chose to study Russian and Persian.

Although such revelations motivated me, they were few and far between. Most of my memories of studying Russian are unhappy ones: pushing myself to literal tears while trying to memorize participle endings, only to learn that using them at all sounded outdated and unnatural, or having to reach for a grammar book with a heavy sigh every time you wanted to write a sentence that involved both a number and a noun – and constantly finding, despite all your efforts, there was still some extra rule you didn’t know about.

I tried to explain this constant battle I found myself in to other Russian students. At first I’d thought that I wasn’t sufficiently disciplined, but I quickly learned my struggle wasn’t unique. 

While I was getting my degree in Russian, I heard about multiple Russian language students, much more diligent and studious than myself, who had been brought to tears in class by their Russian teachers, and many others would admit to at least doing so in private.

Of course, there were exceptions among the professors – there were those who were reassuring and understanding – but overall it was clear there is a uniquely unforgiving and punishing storm that one has to weather in order to learn Russian.

After four years of finely tuning my Russian, I graduated a few months after the full-scale invasion started, into a world that was rejecting everything Russian.

After my dad started working in Kyiv and bought an apartment there, I started to come back and forth from Ukraine and planned to live there after University. I had always spoken Russian there, but now everything had changed.

When I first came back to Ukraine, I saw my friend Yana. I started speaking in Russian, as we had done for the last three or so years, and she politely asked if she could switch to Ukrainian. My stomach twisted with guilt. I, of course, should have asked, but it felt like such an absurd formality when talking with a close friend that I had decided against it.

In an attempt to bridge the gap that widened between us when we spoke, I did my best to use the Ukrainian words that I knew, but it only made the situation more awkward. 

As we talked about our lives, there seemed to be an uncomfortable and embarrassing question that arose out of the distance between us: all that time I spent perfecting my Russian, all the time I spent in Ukraine and never once going to Russia as an adult, why had I never bothered to learn more than a few words of Ukrainian?

Each time I interrupted our conversation to ask for the Russian translation of a Ukrainian word, I felt the knot in my stomach again. Being one of my closest friends, Yana never said anything to me but she did not have to, it was clear both of us felt uncomfortable. The question followed me home that night and, to be honest, has never really left me since. 

It’s difficult when something so political and so much larger than yourself suddenly appears in your personal relationships. 

A few months after the war started I met up with another friend, Nika, a Kharkiv native. She had spoken Russian her whole life and only became fluent in Ukrainian at university but she enjoyed it. “It’s true you really do get to have a different personality in each language,” she told me once.

But despite this, it was not her first language.

She told me her sister had made the switch to Ukrainian. 

“I know it’s wrong and I don’t know why but I find it really annoying,” she said, revealing the internal battle caused more by her unexpected feelings than anything else.

I spoke to Nika a few months after that. Early in the conversation she told me that we should switch to English because she didn’t speak Russian anymore. 

I had known for a long time that I needed to make the switch to Ukrainian, but it was difficult. I finally felt free from the tables of case endings and endless variations on the verb ‘to go’ when I graduated, but now I was back at the beginning.

But learning Ukrainian couldn’t be more different. 

My experience will always be informed by the full-scale invasion, and the new chapter of national pride Ukraine has entered, so my analysis is admittedly biased, but it is hard not to feel that there is something lighter and gentler about Ukrainian than Russian. 

The long vowels lend the language a distinctly sonorous quality that makes it less harsh than Russian. The unique hidden poetry that each language carries seems to me to occur more frequently in Ukrainian: for example, the months are named after natural events. May comes from the Ukrainian word for grass, March and July are named after the Birch and Linden tree and February is Lyutiy, which translates as ‘the fierce month’ – it’s also, coincidentally, the month in which both the full-scale invasion and the war in 2014 began.

My experience of learning Ukrainian has not been one of anxiety, disappointment and shame like learning Russian, but rather one where I feel constantly encouraged and included, and one where, unlike Russian, your efforts feel rewarded.

When I studied Russian, my grammar was often corrected even in the most casual conversations. Although it was always intended as a helpful correction and never a criticism, this habit tended to become exhausting and demotivating. However now Ukrainians will frequently compliment my Ukrainian even if my sentences are an ugly patchwork of broken grammar and guesswork.

Learning Ukrainian after the start of the full-scale invasion, you can’t help but feel you are participating in something larger than yourself, because, after all, it is not just foreigners who are learning Ukrainian, but Ukrainians too. 

According to a survey from a research center in Ukraine, in the first year of the war the number of Ukrainians using Ukrainian in daily life went from 64 percent to 71 percent, while those using Russian decreased by almost 10 percent.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has even launched a free Ukrainian language program called Speak Ukraine encouraging Ukrainians to learn the national language. The website has encouraging quotes from authors like Voltaire: “You can learn a foreign language in six years, and you have to learn your own language all your life,” an outlook that embraces the act of learning and making mistakes as a part of the pleasure of a knowing a language, rather than a process of punishment.

Learning Ukrainian has been a much gentler experience than learning Russian, partially because Ukraine is especially dialectically diverse, with many in Ukraine speaking neither Russian nor Ukrainian but rather Surzhyk – a creative mixture of both languages that differs from person to person. Although there is, of course, correct and incorrect Ukrainian, the language spoken in Ukraine is characterized by a unique elasticity where there are many correct ways of saying the same thing. 

If learning about the absence of the word privacy in Russian taught me about how words and language carry culture and history, learning Ukrainian after Russian taught me about how the culture of language instruction can do the same.

Russian, like English, has a history of being weaponized as a method of subjugation. For centuries, Ukrainians, like other peoples in the Soviet Union and Russian empire, were subjected to policies of Russification and were forced to speak Russian as a way of erasing their identity and the culture and history contained within their languages.

Russian language teaching, with its fixation on accuracy above all else, reflects an inflexible determination to hold onto linguistic purity – to erase everything that is other and never entangle with anything outside of itself.

Ironically this is a reminder of how often Russian does find itself deeply entangled in other languages. Just as Ukrainians speak Surzhyk, other countries from the former Soviet Union speak their own form of Russian intertwined with their national language. I have heard Tajiks break apart Persian verbs and mix them with Russian ones without even realizing it or Uzbeks who mix the alphabets of the two languages, increasing their vocabulary twofold and creating an ever changing range of grammatical and linguistic tools to create meaning.

The strictness of the Russian language and its teaching not only carries the memory of the decades spent forcing people to learn Russian as a way of erasing their non-Russian cultures, but also its monumental failure to do so – inevitably become subsumed as another tool in the ever more creative linguistic toolbox with very few rules at all.

Similarly, the English language carries memory of social segregation through basing ‘correct’ grammar on certain dialects. That has created the idea of ‘proper English’, which suggests that the grammatical rules that shape other dialects are incorrect and the dialects themselves, and the people and history they are a reflection of, are also somehow invalid.

The way I communicate in Ukraine has changed a lot in the last two years.

I am speaking more and more Ukrainian and am slowly forgetting my Russian. 

When I do speak with Ukrainians who speak Russian as a first language, I find it almost impossible to avoid including Ukrainian words, and with Ukrainian speakers, despite my efforts, my Ukrainian is always intertwined with Russian.

If languages and their teaching are able to contain memories of history and culture, then perhaps the way I speak is also a record of my personal journey. 

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