Could a Landfill Power Your Home?

New York City’s new curbside composting program collects food waste from residents in Queens to divert it from landfills. Microorganisms break down the food scraps in a process called anaerobic digestion that creates biogas used to heat 2,500 homes.

Local governments in France are educating residents about waste reduction and finding ways to incentivize the behavior change necessary to meet the country’s ambitious zero-waste goals. Roubaix, for example, teaches residents simple lifestyle changes that will also save them money. Whereas, Smicval transitioned from door-to-door waste collection to a central collection point where residents drop off trash themselves.

When organic materials like wood chips and manure are heated in the absence of oxygen they create a black powdery substance called biochar. This material prevents the release of carbon into the atmosphere from the natural decaying process. And it has other beneficial uses like improving soil fertility, too.

Communities across New Hampshire are implementing “pay as you throw” trash-collection systems to reduce the garbage sent to landfills and increase the use of alternative options like recycling. The programs use several different methods like special bags, stickers, or punch cards, but all require some form of payment per collected trash bag.

By integrating data centers with district heating systems, Nordic countries are successfully reusing waste heat to warm thousands of homes, significantly reducing energy costs and emissions while highlighting geographic, regulatory, and power consumption challenges to scaling the approach further.

Vietnam is building waste-to-energy plants, which burn household waste and generate energy during the process, to remedy its over-full landfills and eventually provide some relief from related air and groundwater pollution.

Eversource Energy, a utility company in Massachusetts, installed a networked geothermal system that provides heat for residential and commercial buildings across the city of Framingham. The connected system allows excess heat from one building to be redirected to another that needs it. It’s the first of its kind in the United States.

A utility company in Framingham, Massachusetts, worked with climate advocates to build a unique geothermal heating and cooling project that spans a whole neighborhood. A group of residential and commercial buildings share the infrastructure necessary to harness stable underground temperatures for heating and cooling, which reduces their greenhouse gas emissions and energy bills.

Utility companies across the United States are using virtual power plants to meet electricity demand, access backup power, and lower the electric bills of participants. To make these power plants work, the utilities use energy from the battery storage systems of customers who have home solar arrays.

Companies in the shipping industry are using green hydrogen as “low-carbon” fuel to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. It’s created by using renewable energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then mixing the hydrogen with green methanol or ammonia.