Anyone who lives or works near a landfill is intimately familiar with methane, the gas that produces that readily identifiable “landfill smell.” Created by decomposing organic matter, methane is 20 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. But those same properties make it a fine source of energy, as more and more local governments are discovering.

“Not long ago, there wasn’t much a landfill could do with methane, except burn it,” points out Brendan Schlauch in the September issue of Governing magazine. “That cuts down the pungent smell and makes nice with neighbors who are unfortunate enough to live near a landfill. Recently, however, localities have come to see methane not just as a stinky nuisance but also as a valuable commodity. Hundreds of landfills around the country have begun transforming methane into electricity and biofuels. The gas can be sent directly to buildings to run heating and cooling systems, can be purified into natural gas, and liquefied or compressed to power garbage trucks and city buses.”

The magazine offers the Development Authority of the North Country, which owns and operates a landfill in New York, as an example. DANC pipes the gas out of the landfill and sends it to a facility where it is processed into heating fuel and used to power an electric plant. Carbon credits offered by the California Action Reserve (CAR), an independent nonprofit that helps organizations both in and out of California to determine their carbon footprint, help foot the bill for the operating costs.

Schlauch states that methane’s relatively short life (nine to 15 years in the atmosphere as opposed to 50 to 200 years for CO2) makes scientists “optimistic that major reductions in methane emissions could lead to a slowing of short-term climate change.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program can’t help these gas-to-energy projects financially, but it will work with landfills to help them determine the economic feasibility of such projects and to find sources of financing. And CAR offers carbon credits that can be sold to other organizations.

Governing points out that “a growing number of private companies are working with municipal landfills to tap these offsets as revenue source. For example, an outfit called Blue Source will pay the upfront costs of a municipal landfill-gas-to-energy project, in exchange for a piece of the profit from offsets trading.”

Landfills may one day power entire cities if methane can be effectively harnessed.