Landfilling

Today we visited Sardinia’s first sanitary landfill. There are a variety of landfills on site, some complete and some still collecting. However, each landfill requires 30 years of management after closure, meaning there is still work happening even where filling is not. In the 90’s this landfill began collecting biogas and built a cogeneration plant. The landfill now is only permitted to collect “special” mostly hazardous industrial waste and ash from incinerators. This means the amount of biogas produced is lower without any organic material breaking down. This created problems for the cogeneration plant, leading to their decision to build a solar farm. While the landfill biogas generates 5 million kWh, the solar farm generates 1.5 million kWh. Since the EU is moving away from incentivizing landfill biogas, they plan to build an anaerobic digester at the plant to produce biogas.