What a landfill costs after the trucks leave

You watch the truck tip its load and drive away. The waste is out of sight, but it does not go away. Most of it stays in the ground for decades, and what it does there is now a measured problem, not a guess.

How much waste the world makes
The World Bank's report What a Waste 2.0 put global municipal solid waste at 2.01 billion tonnes a year and projected 3.40 billion tonnes by 2050. The UN Environment Programme's Global Waste Management Outlook 2024 uses newer numbers: 2.1 billion tonnes in 2023, rising to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050. The two reports use different baseline years and methods, and both show steady growth.

UNEP also puts a price on it. In 2020, direct waste management costs reached USD 252 billion. Adding hidden costs from pollution, poor health and climate change raises that figure to USD 361 billion. UNEP says the annual cost could almost double to USD 640.3 billion by 2050 without urgent action.

What buried waste does to the air
Food scraps, paper and yard waste rot without oxygen once a landfill covers them. That process releases methane, a greenhouse gas. A 2024 study in Nature Sustainability, led by Yao Wang, estimates that landfills produce about 10% of human-caused methane emissions, roughly 50 teragrams a year.

The same study found that standard inventories undercount the problem. Those inventories rely on an IPCC decay model, and the authors corrected its decay constant using data on waste composition and local conditions. Their corrected estimates run up to 200% higher for individual landfills. They argue that monitoring and cutting landfill methane is among the most cost-effective ways to meet current climate goals.

Dumps without controls
A landfill is at least a managed site. Many places have something worse. The World Bank states that at least 33% of the world's waste is mismanaged through open dumping or burning. The report counts both practices as mismanagement.

If you live near an open dump, you see the pile grow and you smell it. Burning, the topic of a later post in this series, adds smoke to the picture. Neither practice produces anything useful from the material.

Why more landfill space does not settle it
Cities can dig new landfills, and many do. The UNEP figures show the bill rising anyway, and the methane study shows the climate cost is larger than earlier inventories reported. A site that fills up also needs a replacement, and land near a city is limited.

Where Nexus Biofuel fits
Nexus Biofuel Inc., based in Kelowna, BC, converts waste streams, including biomass and municipal solid waste, into usable energy. Its equipment is portable and economical, and the process avoids incineration. The company aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, cut greenhouse gas emissions and create jobs.

That approach treats waste as a fuel source instead of a burial problem. Material that would rot in a landfill or burn in an open pile becomes energy that a community can use. Nexus Biofuel's goal is to make that option available to cities and towns that cannot afford large, fixed facilities.