New rules intended to keep a tighter lid on methane gas leaking from the state’s landfills as food and garbage decompose went into effect last month.
The state Department of Ecology estimates the new rules will affect 26 landfills, around half of those in the state, and will decrease landfill-related methane emissions by around 1.6 million metric tons a year. That would be a 38 percent reduction, according to environmental nonprofit Industrious Labs.
The new rules mean Washington joins a list of states including California, Oregon and Maryland that have adopted landfill regulations that are stronger than what is required by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Methane is responsible for 25 percent of the temperature impacts of climate change felt today, according to Ecology. It is a potent greenhouse gas that traps around 28 times the heat per molecule compared to carbon dioxide. However, it lasts in the atmosphere for around a decade compared to thousands of years for carbon dioxide.
In 2022, the Washington Legislature directed Ecology to improve methane monitoring and capture at the state’s municipal solid waste landfills.
Typically, garbage and other waste sit in a landfill before a gas collection system is installed. The system uses pipes in the landfill to collect gases like methane, which can be flared or used to make energy.
The new rules lower the threshold of when gas collection systems must be installed and shorten how long landfill operators have to install them. They also require operators to detect for leaks and repair their systems to prevent them.
Under the previous rules, landfill operators had to detect for methane leaks every 100 feet in a grid, but the new rules tighten that monitoring to every 25 feet, said Cooper Garbe, a rules and planning unit supervisor with Ecology who supervised the rulemaking process.
Under the old rules, only landfills that had around 2.7 million tons of waste in them were subject to certain regulations, Garbe said. The new rules are different for each landfill but generally lower this threshold to around 500,000 to 750,000 tons of waste, he said. Ecology’s rules also give landfill operators 18 months, rather than 30, to install a gas control and collection system after a threshold is met, he said.
In its analysis, Ecology estimated the total cost of the new rules across all landfills would be about $10.5 million with an ongoing annual cost of about $850,000. According to Ecology, the actual costs will be site-specific and the department will know more about how many landfills will be affected when updated reports are due in September.
To comply with the new regulations, landfill operators and owners are eligible to apply for grants from $15 million set aside from the revenue of the state’s carbon-pricing program, created under the Climate Commitment Act. Applications for grants will be open between August and October.
The Cedar Hills Regional Landfill in King County already will not require any significant additional costs to comply and is “doing much of what the new rules require,” said King County Solid Waste spokesperson Joseph Basile. Food and organic waste make up around one-third of the materials in the King County landfill, he said.
Similarly, the Puyallup landfill operated by Land Recovery Inc. is prepared to do additional methane monitoring as required by the new regulation, said district manager Kevin Green. The landfill was the first one in the state to use drones to monitor surface emissions, he said.
Katherine Blauvelt, a director at Industrious Labs, said while the new rules are “a great step forward,” there were a “few notable missed opportunities.”
Specifically, the nonprofit, which focuses on decarbonizing the industrial sector, wanted Ecology to require the use of aerial mapping to detect methane plumes and to require gas collection systems to be implemented earlier.
Because food waste often decays quicker than collection systems are installed, the EPA estimates that 61 percent of methane generated from food waste in landfills is released directly into the atmosphere.
Aerial mapping has found that landfills often leak at high rates, Blauvelt said, and there is better technology to detect methane leaks than handheld sensors.
“We are in this needle-in-a-haystack approach right now for finding large methane emissions, relying on a human being to walk sometimes miles only four times a year,” she said. “Frankly, if a drone can deliver groceries, it could most certainly fly over landfill.”
