A Sensible Approach for Landfill Sites
The initial Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS or ETS) legislation was set up so that landfill operators would be paying for emission from old waste which is simply retrospective legislation and intrinsically unfair.. It suggests now that the way to calculate the land fill emissions would be based on weighbridge data. This makes a lot of sense provided that there is some incentive for the organic content to be reduced. It certainly makes the calculations far easier and more cost effective.
If they were to be somehow measuring the actual methane emissions, separation of emissions from old waste and new waste would be very tricky and expensive process. Provided that the out come is fair and takes account of the waste involved, I am always in favour of a simple and practical solution.
The calculation could be as simple as multiplying tonnes of waste received from July 2011 by the government’s agreed emissions profile for that type of waste
This is a more transparent system and would make it easier to pass cost to customers, and eliminate the risks associated with fluctuating cost of carbon permits. The total lifetime emissions for each load will be “paid for” as it comes across the weighbridge and this system also eliminates the problem of sites being left with an unfunded liability after they stop charging to accept waste.
The one potentially complicated aspect of this proxy system, is determining the gas capture discount applied to each site and the question of gas capture efficiency has sparked much debate in industry circles over recent years.
It has been suggested that state regulators could assess each individual site on a regular basis – say every 3-5 years – to determine its gas capture efficiency. The rating could potentially be broken into several categories, such as 75% for ‘best practice’, 50% for average sites, 25% for sub-par sites and 0% for sites with no gas capture systems.
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