Landfills worldwide: a waste problem that keeps growing

Think about your household garbage from the past week: food scraps, packaging, a broken lamp. In many places, that bag ends up in a landfill or an open dump. Multiply it by billions of households and you have one of the largest infrastructure problems on the planet. This post looks at what the World Bank, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report about landfills, and at where Nexus Biofuel Inc. of Kelowna, BC fits.

How much the world throws away

Municipal solid waste is the trash that households, shops and offices throw out: food, paper, plastic, glass and metal. The World Bank report What a Waste 2.0 estimates that the world generates 2.01 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste each year, using 2016 data. It projects that the figure will reach 3.40 billion tonnes in 2050. UNEP's Global Waste Management Outlook 2024 starts from newer data and lands higher: 2.1 billion tonnes in 2023, rising to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050.

The two reports use different baselines and methods, so the totals differ. Both point the same way: up. A tonne is about the weight of a small car, and the world adds billions of them. Every extra tonne needs somewhere to go.

Dumps with no walls

The word "landfill" suggests an engineered site with a liner, a cover and a plan for the gas it makes. Many places have none of that. According to the World Bank, at least 33 percent of the world's waste is mismanaged through open dumping or burning.

An open dump has no barrier between the waste and the soil beneath it. Rain moves through the pile and carries what it dissolves into the ground. Nothing captures the gas that rotting waste releases. If you live near one, you live with whatever leaves it.

A sanitary landfill works differently. Operators line the base, compact the waste, cover it and collect the gas and liquid that come out. That design takes steady funding and trained staff, and the gap between a site built that way and an open dump is the gap between managed and mismanaged waste.

What buried food does to the air

Food scraps and other organic waste decay without oxygen once a landfill covers them, and that process produces methane. The EPA calls municipal solid waste landfills the third-largest source of methane emissions from human activities in the United States. It also reports that food waste is the largest single component of US municipal solid waste landfills, at 24 percent in 2018, and that food waste accounted for about 58 percent of the methane that escaped from those landfills in 2020.

The EPA states that methane traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. Burying organic waste turns a single disposal decision into a gas source that lasts as long as the waste keeps decaying. These figures describe the United States, but the decay process is the same in any landfill that buries food.

The bill for waiting

UNEP puts a price on the problem. It estimates that the global direct cost of waste management was USD 252 billion in 2020. When it adds the costs of pollution, poor health and climate change, the figure rises to USD 361 billion. UNEP warns that without urgent action, that cost could almost double to USD 640.3 billion by 2050.

The difference between the two 2020 figures is USD 109 billion, and UNEP counts it as damage that the direct cost does not cover. You pay part of that bill whether or not your city has a landfill, through taxes, health costs and the climate effects of the gas those sites release.

Where Nexus Biofuel fits

Nexus Biofuel Inc. works on the other end of the problem. The company converts waste streams, including biomass and municipal solid waste, into usable energy. Its equipment is portable and economical, and it avoids incineration. Nexus Biofuel aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, cut greenhouse gas emissions and create jobs.

Waste that becomes energy does not go to a dump, and food scraps that become energy do not rot in a landfill and release methane there. Landfills will not disappear soon, and the figures above show how much waste still needs a better destination. Nexus Biofuel Inc. in Kelowna builds technology for that job.