The analysis suggests that while the emissions are significantly under reported they also present a major opportunity for mitigation because many of the releases persist for months or even years. Airborne observations offer important advantages over current survey approaches that typically involve a worker walking across portions of the landfill with a detector logging locations of high surface concentrations of methane.
The potent and invisible greenhouse gas, which has more than 80 times the warming capacity of carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, is the primary component of fossil gas but it’s also generated from piles of garbage when organic materials like food scraps break down in the absence of oxygen. Satellites have also helped identify dumps, landfills and waste sites from India to Argentina as methane hotspots.
