Waste management hasn’t been thought of as a climate change solution. No longer.
Without a rapid shift to more sustainable ways of dealing with trash, it will be difficult to meet the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement, a new study suggests. The good news is that such a shift is well within reach technologically, the analysis indicates.
“We found that with the readily existing waste-handling technologies, such as retrofitting landfills, digesting organic waste, and composting organic waste, we can curb global solid waste emissions to net-zero warming by 2050,” says study team member Kok Sin Woon, a sustainability researcher at Xiamen University Malaysia. “However, we need to act immediately, as the results of action need time to manifest.”
Municipal solid waste management hasn’t received much attention as a global warming solution. But it has a lot of potential because decomposition of garbage releases large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Methane is responsible for about one-third of climate warming. It is more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of warming effect, but much less persistent: its half-life in the atmosphere is about 10.5 years, compared to 120 years for carbon dioxide.
