Technology Shaping the Future of Landfills

A growing number of technologies are taking to the skies to remotely detect leaking methane. Meanwhile, analysis frameworks are debuting down on Earth to make sense of the data. As these tools expand, so do their differences.

While the technology advances, state and federal regulatory frameworks largely remain the same. This means landfill operators or outside groups may rely on different standards for how to remotely measure emissions or talk about their findings. That could complicate the communication needed to reduce landfill methane through corporate goals or federal programs. 

On July 5, 2024, the U.S. EPA announced it is collecting information about "new technologies" that could be incorporated into updated emissions guidelines and standards of performance for MSW landfills. The EPA could eventually regulate how the technologies are deployed, a policy shift that some groups say needs to happen. 

“This is about moving from the needle-in-a-haystack to a much more accurate and effective approach of monitoring,” said Katherine Blauvelt, the circular economy director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit focused on cutting emissions from industrial sectors. “This is not bleeding edge at all.”

While EPA data shows the waste sector’s greenhouse gas emissions have declined in recent years, municipal landfills still release the third-largest amount of human-generated methane in the U.S. Today, about 600 of those locations are required by the Clean Air Act to have a technician walk the surface once a quarter with a handheld methane detection tool.

According to Industrious Labs, these standard protocols might be missing crucial information. In a recent examination of EPA inspection reports, the group found that 21 of 22 examined locations had methane exceedances above 500 parts per million — the federal regulatory limit. It also found that site and federal records about emissions contradicted one another at 10 of these locations.

One way to solve this issue, Industrious Labs suggested, is to adopt more comprehensive and up-to-date methane technology.

Currently, EPA regulations don’t speak to the role that remote detection could play in monitoring and regulating this gas. However, policies for oil and natural gas systems — the second-largest source of methane emissions —do recognize these technologies. Revamped guidelines, effective May 7, 2024, allow the EPA to inform owners and operators about “super-emitter” data collected by agency-approved satellites and flyover gear. In some cases, owners will have to fix the source of the greenhouse gases.

Whether the technology is in orbit (like a satellite) or passes closer to the ground (like on a drone or plane), the systems aboard are spectrometers. These devices record light as it bounces off Earth’s atmosphere. More specifically, the spectrometer detects the exact wavelength that methane reflects. When flying past, the device takes a picture of how the methane-specific wavelength is behaving in one spot. An analytics system turns the photo into an estimate of how much methane a given location is emitting.

If the EPA set standards for how remote methane sensing will work in the oil and gas industry, said Blauvelt, then it can do the same for the waste sector. That’s why Industrious Labs is advocating for the federal agency to revise parts of the Clean Air Act to include super emitter interventions for MSW landfills that are similar to what was enacted for oil and gas.

Some remote sensors that could gain EPA approval and accomplish the same tasks for landfills have been operating for years. The commercial enterprise GHGSat, for example, has 12 satellites imaging emissions for fossil fuel and waste industry customers. Other possible remote sensors are just getting started.

Taking to the skies

Launched in March 2024, MethaneSAT is the first emissions detection device sent into orbit by an eight-party partnership including the Environmental Defense Fund, Google and Harvard University.

What looks like a gold box with solar panel wings will scan the Earth in 200 kilometer-wide swathes, creating images with a higher resolution than other devices of its kind that are already circling the globe and detecting methane. The satellite will also pick up on point sources releasing over 500 kilograms of methane per hour. A publicly available online portal will host the MethaneSAT data.

While the program is focusing on oil and gas for now, the satellite will eventually record emissions from waste facilities. 

Depending on when MethaneSAT starts its waste operations, Carbon Mapper might have its satellite watching landfills first. In 2024, the first satellite Carbon Mapper is launching as part of a broader coalition, named Tanager-1, went into orbit looking at a range of major methane sources — from oil and gas to landfills to wastewater treatment plants.

The nonprofit, which blends university and philanthropic backing, has conducted all of its landfill methane sensing so far with EMIT aboard the International Space Station, AVIRIS-NG and the Global Airborne Observatory. The latter two use methane detection systems aboard airplanes and were part of a recent study from Carbon Mapper, published in Science, showing that just over half of all open U.S. landfills the team surveyed were significant sources of methane emissions.  

Measurements done via satellite are more cost-effective than when done by the plane-mounted technology, said Dan Cusworth, director of science at Carbon Mapper. How frequently the satellite will return to each of its targets has yet to be determined. Tanager will view swathes of 18-22 km at a time, so just because it cruises past a location doesn’t mean it can pick up all essential methane sources in the area. Carbon Mapper plans to launch at least one more future Tanager, with the goal of keeping a more regular schedule as more devices are in orbit.

As Carbon Mapper generates more data, the Waste Methane Assessment Platform can add it to its database.

Launched in December 2023, WasteMAP compiles landfill methane measurements and estimates into a single global map. Users can zoom in to specific landfills and see how many tons of methane each facility is estimated to release annually. This data, hosted by RMI, draws on direct readings like those from Carbon Mapper, as well as reported emissions from programs like the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research and results based on a modified version of the EPA’s Solid Waste Emissions Estimation Tool. 

Right now, each data source operates as an independent layer — no site-level emissions estimates are a blend of remote detection values and calculated emissions. Eventually, RMI would like to change that, but for the next few years, the priority will be adding more direct measurement data, said Ellie Garland, a senior associate with the organization focusing on industry methane emission reduction. For all the growth happening in remote methane detection, only a small fraction of facilities in the world have had their emissions assessed this way.

“The reason why we have this pretty complex architecture in place for WasteMAP is that as we start getting more data, we can start stitching it together,” said Tom Frankiewicz, who leads RMI’s efforts to mitigate emissions in waste management.

RMI is also talking to a range of other organizations to see if they’d like to contribute their information to WasteMAP. WM and the Environmental Research & Education Foundation recently worked with RMI on a playbook describing the role that detection technology could have for landfills. Frankiewicz said other waste companies and municipalities have reached out about using or adding to the tool, too.

In a written statement, WM said it deploys satellite, aerial and ground-based technologies and compares the collected datasets to get a sense of accuracy. WM also works with other organizations to evaluate the equipment.

Amy Banister, senior director of air programs at WM, elaborated further during a presentation at WasteExpo in May. In early 2024, WM selected seven sites to receive quarterly barrages of emission measurements from satellite, flyover and land-based detection gear.

“One of the challenges is trying to get all this technology to line up on the same day. It just doesn't happen,” Banister said. Though the ideal comparison approach would have all the technology operating together, weather and other conditions can mean that fitting all the measurements into a single week is a success. 

The company is also linked to three of the five projects that received Science to Achieve Results grant funding from the EPA in 2023 to study monitoring and modeling landfill emissions. With another program running test methane releases for monitoring at one landfill site, “we're really trying to hone in on the accuracy and reliability of these technologies before we pick our ponies,” Banister said.

Integrating feedback from a wide range of satellite, airplane and drone programs could be easier if a federal standard set protocols. Without guidance on how to deploy the different options and how resulting data is reported — and without incentives for remote detection in the first place — tying together inputs gets challenging, said Frankiewicz.

What’s next

While private initiatives are trying new technologies and figuring out how to integrate various readings, government initiatives to implement the same gear over landfills are farther behind.

Washington state, for example, announced updated landfill emission regulations this past May. The policy — which affects about two dozen sites — requires gas collection and control equipment and quarterly emissions testing, but the latter will be done by “instantaneous surface monitoring procedures.” According to an Industrious Labs report, the drafted rules “[fail] to provide for monitoring using improved technology.”

The same day that Washington state announced its new monitoring program, nine U.S. senators requested that the 2025 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill give the EPA funding to help states put satellite or flyover-based sensors into action over landfills. 

Some industry practitioners, such as environmental engineer Eugene Tseng, would like to see the array of detection technologies get even wider. Tseng, who is also an attorney, is currently working as an independent advisor with the Sunshine Canyon Landfill Local Enforcement Agency in California. He has also worked with Carbon Mapper, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other researchers on satellite-based and plane-based methane detection.

He said that the closer to real-time the aerial methane measurement is conveyed, the easier it is for his team to learn what’s causing any detectable leak — whether it is a crack in the cover or a new animal den. Delays from when flyover technology takes photos to when the calculated methane hotspot data is publicly available can sometimes be a month long. Making best use of the feedback requires matching the information with that day’s weather, barometric pressure, where material was tipped, waste types and more.

“I maybe spend about 1% of my time looking at the aerial imaging, but all the other stuff is looking at the actual operational data from all the different agencies and trying to make sense of that,” Tseng said. 

Ideally, Tseng said methane-detection rovers would scramble over landfills and provide instant feedback from mere inches above the surface — pinpointing the exact locations and conditions generating the emissions. 

WM’s Banister said the constant flux of operations at a landfill make it challenging to build single-site measurements into a broader assessment of long-term emissions. WM wants a greenhouse gas measurement system running by 2025 to help evaluate how well it’s approaching the goal of a 42% reduction in scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2031, and is keeping its options open.

”We're realizing that there is no one technology to rule them all,” Banister said. “It's going to take a suite of technologies.”

Even if follow-up work is needed after a remote methane measurement to figure out the underlying causes, the eye-in-the-sky approach can at least identify priority areas, like leaks or super-emitters, more quickly. 

Blauvelt said a 2019 study published in Nature indicating that 10% of point sources identified in California accounted for 60% of all point source emissions supports this idea. The research team behind the paper relied on airborne methane imaging. Not applying a similar approach nationwide has consequences, she said.

“It's leaving just a ton of methane emissions on the table that could be better mitigated.”

Cole Rosengren contributed reporting to this story.

Disclosure: WasteExpo is run by Informa, the owner of Waste Dive’s publisher, Industry Dive. Informa has no influence over Waste Dive’s coverage.

With the reelection of Donald Trump to the White House, it might appear that recent regulations implemented by the U.S. EPA on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are on shaky ground. But Trump's announcement that he wanted former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the EPA, combined with continued progress on PFAS destruction technology, has some waste executives seeing as much opportunity as difficulty in the future PFAS regulatory environment.

“We're in this weird space. If you own a company, do you manage PFAS, do you avoid it?” said Bryan Staley, president and CEO of the Environmental Research & Education Foundation, at the Corporate Growth Conference in Chicago in November 2024. “The hedge would be, manage it as if it is more concerning than not. Then if it ends up not being concerning, then you can deal with that at a later time.”

As a Republican representative from New York, Zeldin supported legislation that would have regulated certain PFAS under the National Drinking Water Standard. The agency ultimately set its own regulations for several PFAS in a final ruling released in April 2024. 

But under a new administration, there's a “good chance” the EPA would be directed to walk back its designation of certain PFAS as hazardous under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, said Michael Jensen, senior counsel and director of regulatory affairs for WM. Such a move was laid out as a goal in Project 2025, the policy document released by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a second Trump term.

The EPA’s CERCLA designation for PFAS was announced shortly after the drinking water standard in 2024. It immediately drew concerns from some waste and recycling groups that facilities that receive PFAS-containing materials but do not manufacture them — like landfills or recycling facilities — would be held liable for remediating contamination. 

“We think that CERCLA is the wrong way to approach regulation, but we're not opposed to regulation entirely,” Jensen said.

The National Waste & Recycling Association is currently suing the EPA in an attempt to have the agency reconsider its CERCLA decision. Jensen said the industry has also tried to work with Congress this session to get an exemption for “passive receivers” of PFAS chemicals like landfills, but was stymied during an election year.

With a Republican trifecta controlling all three branches of the federal government, he’s more optimistic about action in the coming years. He noted Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who is expected to lead the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, has been sympathetic to the industry’s concerns.

“I think right now with her having the gavel and strong support in that committee, we may be able to pass some sort of CERCLA relief, some sort of exemption for landfills in the future, and hopefully that will be taken up by the rest of Congress,” Jensen said.

But while the waste and recycling industry continues to fight mandates for PFAS remediation, some companies also believe the uncertainty caused by regulations will lead to more business.

Clean Harbors is making progress on its own PFAS destruction technology, which it's developing in coordination with EPA and the U.S. Department of Defense. The company performed an OTM-50 stack test with PFAS-contaminated material in 2024 at its Utah incineration facility, and expects to release the results of that test in the first quarter of 2025, Jay Cudmore, executive vice president of disposal services, said at the event. He said the technology could reduce contamination by "six nines," or by 99.9999%.

"We feel really confident in how it's coming out," Cudmore said.

Clean Harbors also offers a range of PFAS sampling and remediation technologies. Cudmore said that his company was seeing a fair amount of business from fire departments needing to dispose of their aqueous firefighting foam, which can contain PFAS chemicals. But he noted that customers are so far agnostic on the treatment type and level of remediation they seek.

"Your early adopters, they know that the regulations are coming, they're trying to get ahead," Cudmore said. "So they're coming to Clean Harbors, looking for that full suite of services."

Other companies like Battelle and Veolia have also looked to cash in on the PFAS treatment market. The latter company launched its own suite of treatment and compliance services, dubbed BeyondPFAS, in October 2024.

The executives speaking at the November conference noted that regardless of uncertainty surrounding federal regulations, states are likely to continue pursuing PFAS regulation. New York and Illinois, for instance, have both prohibited thermal destruction of PFAS-containing firefighting foam. 

Jensen said he expected a "patchwork quilt" of regulations to spring up as some states work to get ahead of the EPA.

"It's not just the progressive states either," Jensen said. "PFAS policy doesn't always run along red versus blue lines. I wouldn't be surprised to see Oklahoma or a different state pursue that other regulation."

Those regulations are likely to raise costs on treating PFAS-laden materials, including sludges from wastewater treatment plants. Executives at the Corporate Growth Conference said treatment costs at landfills that receive such materials could double, but they could pass those costs onto their customers.

Said Cudmore: “I think that the market is evolving, and if regulations tighten, obviously the markets get bigger.”

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Landfill operators in the United States have reduced their overall emissions by roughly 45% since regulations first passed in the 1990s, according to U.S. EPA data. But more can be done, vendors and speakers said at the Solid Waste Association of North America's Wastecon show last week.

The event, which featured panel discussions on a range of topics, included a discussion of the human influence on climate change from John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist at Texas A&M University and director of the Southern Regional Climate Center. Nielsen-Gammon said the waste industry can play a role in mitigating climate change, but that it will take "a lot of imagination" to advance solutions.

Amy Lestition Burke, the CEO and executive director of SWANA, said the session was a reminder that the waste and recycling industry has a "vital role to play" in impacting climate change. She also said a changing climate will have impacts on operations, equipment, training, budgets and more for its members. 

"We want to be on the offense, and to do that, we need to be prepared with information and data," Burke said in an emailed statement following the event. "These preparations tie into SWANA’s goals to make the industry safer and to be climate champions.”

Landfills represented 71.8% of the waste industry's total emissions in 2022, according to the EPA, and as such represent the biggest target for reductions. Awareness of fugitive emissions has risen at the same time as demand for energy has grown rapidly in the U.S., making capturing landfill gas not only important from a climate perspective but attractive as a revenue driver.

That demand growth is driven in part by the need for data centers, Bryan Black, co-founder and CEO of landfill-gas-to-energy company Nodal Power, said during a panel. He said that while electricity demand has historically grown slowly, the rise of artificial intelligence and other resource-intensive technologies has caused a rapid increase in demand for more energy.

“Ultimately there's a lot of [energy] sources that are going to be required to meet that need,” Black said. Increased energy prices as a result of that market imbalance have made gas capture lucrative.

Qnergy, a company that's fresh off a successful demonstration at a landfill in Weber County, Utah, hopes it can provide emissions abatement at the beginning and end of a landfill's life. 

Isaac Garaway, the company's chief technology officer, said Qnergy's Stirling engine system has worked effectively in the oil and gas sector for years. But the company has found a new use case for the technology — converting landfill methane that's "highly corrosive, wet and pretty much useless for other technology" into energy via a modular, scalable system.

Through a demonstration project in Maryland, Qnergy has fine-tuned its system for landfill gas specifically, creating a version of its technology that is capable of managing the variability of gases arising from landfills. The company plans to launch its standalone system for landfills in 2024, Garaway said.

Garaway said the technology turns something that was formerly a liability for landfill operators — the emissions released before landfill gas collection systems are installed or after the gas from a closed landfill becomes too dirty for traditional systems — into an opportunity to generate revenue via carbon credits. The company is willing to partner with public landfill owners to install a full gas collection system and operate it. It can also sell its technology to private landfill owners who just want to incorporate the technology into their existing systems, depending on each landfill's needs.

Another company, LoCI Controls, is also working to address landfill emissions with more modern technology. The company's monitoring system attaches to landfill gas wells and can adjust to changes in the composition of landfill gases in real-time. That has made the technology particularly useful for companies refining landfill gas into renewable natural gas. Such systems can only tolerate slight changes — less than 1% — in the relative oxygen content of landfill gas as it enters their RNG refining plants. LoCI's systems can detect such changes and adjust the vacuum in individual wellheads that may be sucking up too much oxygen from the landfill, potentially saving downtime for the plant.

Dave Hostetter, a vice president at SCS Engineers, said well monitoring technology can reduce labor costs by removing the need for engineers to investigate faulty wellheads in person. Instead, personnel can be redirected to addressing issues quicker and making gas collection systems as efficient as possible.

“That person that was doing it can now do something more productive,” Hostetter said. “We're trying to really leverage technology to get better results at your facility.”

Two groups have announced plans or launched new satellites in 2024 that can map fugitive landfill gas. The technology is maturing at a critical time for emissions mitigation, as regulators consider tightening restrictions on landfills and deadlines loom for global methane reduction commitments.

In November 2024, GHGSat announced plans to launch nine satellites by the end of 2026, nearly doubling its existing fleet of 12. Carbon Mapper announced the launch of its Tanager-1 satellite in August 2024, and it began reporting data from the satellite in November.

These satellites, which can home in on gases like carbon dioxide and methane, could play an important role in helping nations find and address greenhouse gas emissions, Jean-Francois Gauthier, senior vice president of strategy for GHGSat, said on a recent webinar.

“The bottom line is that in the past year we've detected more emissions than ever before, despite global pledges,” Gauthier said. “It's clear that both industry and governments need better data, as well as detection and monitoring capabilities.”

The expansion of monitoring technologies has earned increasing support from the public sector, as regulators and non-governmental organizations work to tackle plumes of escaped methane, a gas with more than 80 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over 20 years and a major component of landfill gas. The private sector, which includes large landfill owners, is also getting on board with the technology to tighten existing gas collection systems.

GHGSat, based in Quebec, is a private company that launched the first commercial satellite to measure greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources in 2016. The company has worked with regulators like the U.S. EPA and Environment and Climate Change Canada to demonstrate its technology, and it has had its instruments validated by NASA and the European Space Agency.

Gauthier said satellites could play a role in making emissions data for landfills more accurate, something that has drawn the attention of environmentalists who say the industry and federal agencies are undercounting emissions with overly generous models.

He said that phenomenon played out as GHGSat monitored oil and gas wells over the last eight years. New data from satellites and other technologies has allowed scientists to find wells where models predicted emissions levels two or three times lower than real-world conditions, Gauthier said. After demonstrations of satellites’ success with oil and gas monitoring, the EPA has signaled its willingness to accept aerial imaging as a new monitoring technology in the sector.

Gauthier is hoping to repeat that process with landfills. Satellite companies are betting they can convince EPA to recognize satellite monitoring technology as part of a suite of modern technologies used to demonstrate compliance with landfill rules.

"It's a very different environment, because there's been so many advances in the last five, 10 years in all levels of measurements for methane," Gauthier said.

Carbon Mapper recently began updating its publicly available data portal with scans from its Tanager satellite. Though the nonprofit cautions the information is preliminary, it has already begun to identify several methane plumes originating from landfills in the U.S.

The largest such plume appears to be at GFL Environmental's Sampson County Landfill in North Carolina, a facility that has been flagged for emissions issues for years. The facility recently commissioned a system to convert landfill gas to renewable natural gas with Opal Fuels; that came online in October 2024.

Carbon Mapper said in a press release in October that its publicly available data portal can complement existing satellite monitoring efforts like NASA’s own EMIT system. Its scientists also hope the data can be used to inform local advocates near polluting landfills. The nonprofit, backed by major philanthropic donors and support from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, plans to launch an additional Tanager satellite to complement the first.

Landfill engineers caution the satellites won’t be able to replace other methods of detecting landfill emissions. Different forms of advanced emissions monitoring are better for different scenarios, Dave Hostetter, a vice president at SCS Engineers said at Wastecon in October.

Generally speaking, "the further away you get from the methane, the more difficult it is to pinpoint where it's coming from,” Hostetter said. But satellites, in his view, have the benefit of being able to capture a snapshot of a landfill many times over the course of a relatively long equipment lifespan. 

In one example of this, GHGSat has been able to capture emissions from a landfill in Israel roughly 80 times over the past year and a half, Gauthier said. But he also agrees that satellites are not a one-size-fits-all solution.

“This is not a silver bullet; this is one tool to bring to the table to use in conjunction with measurements on the ground,” Gauthier said.

He also sees GHGSat as coexisting alongside an ecosystem of satellite networks, including those run by Carbon Mapper or agencies like NASA. Gauthier said GHGSat has been following Carbon Mapper for some time and “welcomes” the launch of their satellite, saying there may be room for collaboration in the future.

“It would be a little bit petty to see this as competition, honestly, because there is a need for as many satellites as we can [get] right now,” Gauthier said. “There are way too many emissions to start picking and choosing which instrument is being used for this.”

The U.S. EPA has an opportunity to significantly increase the efficiency of landfill emissions regulations with its anticipated update to Clean Air Act regulations in 2025, research group Industrious Labs argues in a new report.

Industrious looked at the opportunity to reduce emissions by requiring better landfill cover materials and practices. Its researchers also noted how such practices could mesh with the growing capabilities of new monitoring technologies, which are rapidly entering mainstream practices.

The report argues regulations are the best way to ensure the most up-to-date practices are applied across the widest swath of landfills. It found that its recommendations could lead to a 56% reduction in U.S. landfill methane emissions from 2025 to 2050.

The EPA signaled in July it would update its air emissions requirements for new and existing landfills in 2025. The updated New Source Performance Standards for new facilities and Emissions Guidelines for existing facilities would be the first promulgated since 2016. They would be published months later than EPA's legally obligated deadline to update such requirements every eight years.

Environmental groups have long said an update to landfill emissions regulations is overdue, as the Biden administration has made cutting methane emissions a key climate priority. A majority of MSW landfills in the country are currently required to comply with the standard, but getting the 2016 standard to apply to landfills has been a challenge. The regulation stalled under the Trump administration and was revived by the Biden administration. The current standard went into effect in 2021 and extended regulation to an additional 1,590 landfills.

In September 2024, the EPA released its findings from landfill inspections around the country over the last three years. It found "widespread" issues of noncompliance with existing landfill emissions regulations, many of which resulted in methane emissions exceedances.

While enforcement will be needed to tackle the issue of methane emissions compliance, a more comprehensive set of regulations tailored explicitly to methane will deliver the best results, said Katherine Blauvelt, circular economy campaign director at Industrious Labs.

"First and foremost, I think we can get the EPA out of playing the game of whack-a-mole and trying to find where there are issues of noncompliance," Blauvelt said. "Let's use the technology that's available today."

A growing body of evidence has shown the use of drones and satellite imaging can replace current landfill methane monitoring practices — which Blauvelt described as the antiquated, “Windows 2000” approach to tracking emissions. But the new Industrious report modeled the impact of improving methane collection abilities on the ground. They found that updates to landfill cover practices and gas collection and control systems could reduce landfill emissions by 2,922 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050, cutting more than half of the estimated 5,197 million metric tons of CO2e that Industrious predicts landfills will emit if no changes are made.

“This analysis really simply confirms that dramatically reducing methane emissions from landfill is highly achievable, and that’s really timely,” Blauvelt said.

The report from Industrious found that EPA could extend landfill emissions regulation to cover more landfills and capture their methane emissions. Industrious' researchers propose that landfills with at least 200,000 tons of waste in place or that generate more than 664 tons per year of methane should fall under the regulation.

The EPA should also update what those landfills must do to keep a lid on their methane emissions, the researchers argue. Highlighting the EPA's own findings that 61% of methane from food waste is released from landfills before gas collection systems are installed, Industrious' report proposes that such systems should be installed within one year of waste being placed in a landfill cell. Those systems should also be required to incorporate horizontal gas collection components, integration with leachate management systems and other design improvements if necessary, per the report.

The report also took a look at cover materials required for landfill cells under existing law. Currently, requirements surrounding cover material are regulated by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, according to Industrious. Those regulations don't have restrictions around methane, and as such can contribute to methane leaks that are increasingly being detected via satellite imaging.

In certain cases, landfill operators can install better cover systems that oxidize landfill gas and lower the rate of methane generation. Industrious' researchers argued EPA should require landfill operators to take the latest research on such practices into account. 

"I think the main takeaway is how many of these emissions that we can reduce by doing these simple things," said Kim Finlay, senior campaign analyst at Industrious.

The U.S. EPA continues to study methane monitoring and best practices for landfills as part of its National Strategy to Advance an Integrated U.S. Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System. In 2023, it also required the first landfill to use drone monitoring technology to comply with a consent order over fugitive emissions.

The U.S. EPA is soliciting comments on a series of white papers regarding landfill management practices through Jan. 23, 2025, the agency announced in a release. The agency said it is looking for ways to "streamline, improve, and harmonize the current suite of emissions regulations" for municipal solid waste landfills.

In eight white papers, the agency included a series of possible changes to its New Source Performance Standards and Emissions Guidelines for new and existing landfills. Those changes include adding an organic waste diversion credit, allowing a regular aerial monitoring program, creating a methane emission threshold to trigger regulations for landfills and more.

The agency has previously indicated that it would update emissions regulations for new and existing landfills in 2025. It last issued an update in 2016 but that was not fully adopted until 2021. 

The EPA has faced growing pressure to update its MSW landfill regulations, including from Congress. The Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works held a hearing in 2024 to address landfill emissions monitoring and mitigation efforts. There, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said the EPA has handled emissions monitoring poorly for a long time, and committee leadership noted the need for updated rules.

In May, a group of nine senators also called on the EPA to send states more money to improve emissions monitoring efforts, noting the agency's own research finding it is likely undercounting methane emissions.

"Stronger EPA regulations for landfill emissions are critical to slash planet-warming methane emissions, advance environmental justice, and achieve our climate commitments," the senators wrote.

Agency staff indicated methane emissions would be a focus of EPA’s next rulemaking for landfill emissions, as scientists have begun to grapple with methane’s outsized greenhouse gas impact. In one of the newly released white papers, the agency proposed adding a threshold based on methane emissions which, once surpassed, would require landfills to install a gas collection and control system. Current regulations don’t require a landfill to install such a system based on methane emissions, relying instead on other gases and measurements. 

The EPA's white papers also take note of rising emissions technologies, including aircraft and satellites. For its aerial monitoring white paper, the EPA tallied benefits and drawbacks for both remote sensing technologies and direct-air sampling, the latter of which is done by aircraft. It also discussed possible applications for the technology in federal New Source Performance Standard regulations, which govern newly commissioned landfills. Finally, it posed questions about how technologies could be incorporated, including reasonable levels of accuracy and when the technology should be deployed.

The agency's other white papers follow a similar format. In its gas collection system white paper, agency staff conducted a literature review of best practices for the systems. They looked at the impact of daily barometric pressure changes and liquid leachate levels, as well as technology to address those issues. 

The agency also proposed making organic waste diversion from landfills a possible component of the next NSPS or EG regulation. Its white paper on that topic recognized this as a "departure from the current 'business-as-usual' approach" to landfill regulations. 

In the paper, agency staff noted that the Environmental Integrity Project has previously posed organic waste diversion as an "alternative compliance mechanism" for landfills. The mechanism would work by crediting methane emissions reductions based on the amount of organic waste a landfill diverts from disposal. The EPA said it could also facilitate that diversion by creating a standing approval for projects like composting and anaerobic digestion undertaken by a landfill operator.

Other topics the white papers covered include daily, intermediate and final cover materials for landfills; gas control systems installation; and the size threshold past which landfills must be covered by regulations. The agency said it would release three additional white papers as part of the same docket “in the near future.” It plans to provide a separate opportunity for public comment on any future proposed rule regarding MSW landfills in 2025. 

The federal agency Environment and Climate Change Canada has released a draft regulation that would set minimum standards for controlling landfill methane emissions in the country for the first time. The regulation is in the second phase of a three-phase rule-making process, with a public comment period that closed Aug. 28.

The agency would set new requirements regarding annual emissions reports, surface emissions monitoring, methane destruction and other key aspects of monitoring and reducing methane emissions at a landfill. ECCC estimates the regulation would avoid 107 metric megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2025 and 2040, with an average cost of $5 Canadian per metric ton.

"Reducing emissions from methane is one of the top recommendations made by climate scientists to slow the rate of global warming. To achieve Canada’s emissions reduction targets, we need to reduce landfill methane emissions," ECCC Minister Steven Guilbeault said in a statement. "The proposed Regulations would set standards that are in line with the most stringent requirements in North America."

Canada, like the United States, is a signatory of the Global Methane Pledge, an international agreement to reduce methane emissions 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. The Canadian government estimates its landfills are responsible for 17% of the nation’s methane emissions.

For existing landfills, the proposed regulation would apply to any facility that has accepted MSW in 2010 or later and has more than 450,000 metric tons of MSW in place. It would also apply to those that accept more than 10,000 metric tons of waste in a year and have more than 100,000 metric tons of waste in place after the regulation goes into effect.

That threshold would cover most of the landfills that serve Canada's major population centers, according to Dave Risk, a scientist who leads emissions research group Flux Lab. He estimated the regulation would cover most of the 270 landfills that serve 90% of the Canadian population.

The regulation would “even out” the regulatory environment for landfills, he said, aligning fairly closely to the standards in the strictest provinces: Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario.

“We have quite a mixed bag right now, and also provinces have done very differently when it comes to diversion rates and keeping organics out of the landfill,” Risk said. “[It would] set all provinces on the track of what the best in class is.”

Industry organizations and major landfill owners, like WM, are currently reviewing the proposal. SWANA previously offered comments when ECCC released a higher-level framework for the rule in 2022. The organization successfully pushed ECCC to raise the threshold of applicability to apply to fewer landfills. SWANA has also raised concerns about the cost of monitoring technology, said Kristyn Oldendorf, director of public policy at the Solid Waste Association of North America.

The proposed regulation would allow drone monitoring technology. It specifically cites the U.S. EPA’s approval of Michigan-based Sniffer Robotics’ drone technology as an acceptable practice for Canadian landfills. Sniffer announced it had begun operating at certain landfills in Canada in a company LinkedIn post in June 2024.

The proposed regulation is good news for advocates who have been pushing for methane reductions, especially for countries like Canada that have signed onto the Global Methane Pledge. While the U.S. has achieved landfill gas reductions for decades through reporting and gas collection programs, it hasn’t updated its landfill gas regulations since 2016. The EPA recently announced it was planning to take another look at that regulation, potentially issuing a proposal this year.

Canada’s proposal is analogous to some of the tougher U.S. states whose regulations go beyond federal landfill gas requirements like Washington, Oregon and Maryland, said Katherine Blauvelt, circular economy campaign director at Industrious Labs.

“States have acknowledged, ‘Okay, we really have to be more precise about who's got a large amount of methane coming out of their landfill,’” Blauvelt said. “It looks like they've moved in that direction.”

Blauvelt said the biggest challenge for identifying landfill methane is by identifying exceedances, or areas where gas capture systems are failing to contain methane. The resulting plumes from such events are increasingly drawing concern as drones, flyovers and other measurement methods begin detecting these previously unmeasured releases.

Tackling them will require more advanced monitoring technologies, like the drones that received a nod from EPA and now ECCC, Blauvelt said. She said the Canadian proposal shows the government is getting serious about its methane commitments and not a moment too soon — the regulation is set to kick in beginning in 2027, just three years before Canada’s methane reduction deadline.

“You've got to skate to where the puck is. You've got to set those minimum standards to really be effective. The only way you do that is by making sense and incorporating these remote sensing technologies,” Blauvelt said. “They've got to be required at the end of the day.”