Last month, Tom Koutroulis, director of Orange County Waste & Recycling, signed off on a grant request that he hopes could fundamentally change how America handles one of the oldest but least understood drivers of global warming: garbage.

It isn’t a huge ask as these things go; $25 million from a $5 billion fund overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. The money would pay for what Koutroulis calls the “Smart Landfill System,” essentially a cluster of new technologies (specially equipped drones, 24/7 sensors and the like) aimed at improving the way his agency measures and tracks the methane that belches out of the three big active landfills in Orange County.

But if the request sounds like it’s limited to a few local garbage piles, its impact, in Koutroulis’ view, could be much bigger — modernizing an already-complex world (landfill management) where change happens slowly and is often met with strong resistance.

It also dovetails with his even bigger goal, to improve public health by slowing the  rise (literally) of a particularly nasty cause of global warming.

“What we’re proposing would be a disruptor,” Koutroulis said.

“If they (the EPA) give us this money, our system will probably be the first of its kind used at this scale,” he added. “It could change the entire industry.”

Yet that still might not be enough.

Even if Koutroulis’ idea works as he hopes, and the EPA eventually requires that some version of a Smart Landfill strategy be implemented at the 1,700-plus active landfills around the country, a growing number of scientists believe the problem he’s hoping to combat – the amount of methane sent into the atmosphere from landfills – is far more dire than previously believed.

New mystery

Methane is the gas created from the decomposition of organic matter, which means lot of human activities and natural events can generate it. Cows, for example, are well-known methane leakers. So are oil and gas refineries, rice fields, volcanoes, gas stoves, water treatment plants, restaurants and farms, among others.

Another well-known methane generator is garbage. But how much methane is produced by our biggest garbage piles – landfills – is a new and important mystery.

In the April 30 edition of the journal “Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics,” engineering researchers from Harvard published a study that says the EPA vastly underestimates the amount of methane generated by landfills, urban areas and in several states.

Specifically, the Harvard researchers found this: The amount of methane spewed into the atmosphere by U.S. landfills in 2019 was 51% more than the methane emission numbers reported to the EPA by landfill operators.

The Harvard study came out just weeks after the publication of a separate report – conducted, in part, by a Pasadena-based nonprofit, Carbon Mappers – that suggested U.S. landfills are producing methane at a rate even higher than that, roughly three times more than what is reported to regulators by landfill operators.

Though their exact numbers differ, both studies raise common questions that, for a couple reasons, are potentially important climate news.

First, the EPA already lists landfills as the nation’s third-biggest source of human-produced methane. If that estimate is based on numbers that are decidedly lower than the amount of methane that’s actually flowing into the atmosphere, it could mean global warming is happening at a pace already in excess of current projections.

What’s more, landfill-generated methane has been regulated for decades. State and federal rules call for operators to routinely measure methane plumes at every landfill and, when possible, to trap and reuse the gas as a form of energy. Since 2016, a power plant at the Frank R. Bowerman Landfill in Irvine has used methane captured at the site to generate enough electricity for 26,000 homes, according to the county. Similar operations happen at many urban landfills, though few are as efficient or produce as much energy as the plant in Irvine.

So if a significant amount of methane is leaking into the atmosphere even after modern recycling systems have been put in place, it’s possible that landfill regulations might need an overhaul if state, national and international goals on slowing climate change are going to be met.

The second reason a methane undercount could be grim is this: Methane is a powerful driver (and a potential solution; more on that later) of global warming.

Like carbon dioxide, which is the most common ingredient in global warming, methane boosts the earth’s temperature by serving as a heat-trapping blanket. Methane is particularly good at this, and early in its life it can capture 80 times more heat than can be captured by carbon dioxide.

That’s why reducing the amount of methane released into the atmosphere is listed as a specific goal of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Overall, climate change rules say methane emissions in 2030 are supposed to be 30% lower than they were in 2020.

The new reports suggest that goal might be farther away than previously realized.

Running routes

Scientists and others who care about methane emissions talk about “top-down” versus “bottom-up” systems of tracking.

Top-down tracking combines measurements of actual methane plumes with mathematical models based on everything from the amount of garbage poured into a specific landfill to the types of industry and waste that are most common in a particular community.

In their report, the Harvard researchers described “top-down” measurements as being based on “observations of atmospheric methane to infer emissions, often through inverse analyses using a chemical transport model.”

Bottom-up measurements aren’t so tricky.

Though modern landfills are technologically complex structures, regulated by dozens of agencies and overseen by trained environmental engineers, the bottom-up method of measuring methane is a fundamentally low-tech operation – humans walking up to and sometimes over garbage while carrying hand-held devices (called “sniffers”) that detect and measure methane plumes.

Koutroulis and others even use a football term – “route running” – to describe the strategy. And the goal is just as simple: to find places on the outer layer of the landfill where methane or any other gas is seeping out and measure those so-called “fugitive emissions.”

But in many modern landfills, such as those in Orange County, there’s so much ground to cover – the Bowerman landfill in Irvine (one of the nation’s biggest) eventually will grow to 534 acres, or slightly bigger than Disneyland plus California Adventure – that it isn’t practical to physically track methane plumes.

Even though current regulations call for methane-detection routes to be run every quarter at every landfill, and for independent measurements to verify what is found by the landfill operators, results from the two new methane studies, and other reports, suggest the rules might not match the problem.

It’s why Koutroulis wants to create a new tracking system, one that relies on low-flying drones and sensors at key spots on the landfill, to generate real-time data. Such information, he said, might make it possible for his team to reduce methane emissions as they occur, not after.

“A landfill is a living, breathing entity. It can get upset. It can get a fever, burp; it can go sideways on you,” Koutroulis said.

“That’s why you have to constantly monitor everything – flow rates, temperature, moisture content; all these points of data – to determine the overall health and efficiency of the landfill gas collection systems.”

The current rules, which include the use of humans and hand-held detection devices, have been in place in California since 2010. They call for landfills to trap 75% of the gasses (including methane but also carbon dioxide and others) they generate, meaning a quarter of those gasses can be released legally into the air.

Koutroulis and others suggested new state and federal rules could be in place within the next 12 months. If his drone-based experiment influences what those new standards look like, Koutroulis said he’s OK with that.

“If the end result is tougher standards, and it helps set standards for the rest of the nation, then fine,” he said.

“All of the greenhouse gasses coming out (of landfills) are problematic. The question, the issue really, is how we control them.”

Methane watch

Scientists aren’t alone in tracking – or trying to track – methane emissions.

“I worry about it, given where we live,” said Angela Nguyen, who lives near the Great Park in Irvine, about 4 miles south of the Bowerman landfill.

Nguyen studied environmental science in college and worked for a hazardous-waste clean-up company before choosing to stay home to raise three kids. A few years ago, she said, when she and her family were looking for a home, she learned that methane from landfills can boost ozone levels and that ozone, in turn, can cause or exaggerate asthma and other health conditions.

“Everything we can see suggests it’s not a problem around here. But I don’t know if the data is really available.”

It’s not, yet, but it might be soon.

On March 4, between the publication of the two new studies on landfill-generated methane, a SpaceX rocket took off from a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base to ferry a new satellite into space: MethaneSAT.

The public-private venture is aimed at creating the first-ever public database of methane emissions, and of the biggest emitters. It’s also indicative of how methane is viewed as both a key cause of global warming and a potential game changer in the battle to prevent the earth from overheating.

While methane is odorless, colorless, ubiquitous and tragically excellent at trapping heat, it also doesn’t stick around too long, dissipating from the atmosphere far sooner than it takes for carbon dioxide to go away. That means any reduction in methane emissions could produce comparatively fast results when it comes to keeping the planet from overheating.

So, for the past two months, MethaneSAT – a venture from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and the New Zealand Space Agency that was financed in part by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – has been circling the planet about 15 times a day at an altitude of 360 miles. It captures detailed methane counts from 50 regions of the earth.

How detailed?

In an interview with the New York Times, Steven Hamburg, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who helped lead the MethaneSAT project, suggested the view would be granular enough to track specific methane violators.

“It allows us to basically put on a pair of bifocals so we can see things both in the small scale, and the wider scale.”

If the project creates a public database, and if the database can show where methane is coming from – even a local landfill – it’ll attract some eyeballs.

“I’ll check it out,” Nguyen said. “I’ll be watching.”