Landfills store the waste we create which isn’t easily reused, recycled or recovered.
Today landfills are highly engineered and regulated to reduce their environmental impact. After being closed they are often repurposed into usable public spaces such as parks, golf courses or sporting fields, including Sydney Olympic Park in NSW. Together with our customers, we are saving the planet, one landfill at a time by putting to good use the gas generated by landfills. We reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create renewable energy.
Why landfills still exist.
We produce waste as we consume and live our lives. As our standard of living increases we produce more waste.
Currently in Australia, up to 50% of all waste in landfill is organic matter such as food, textiles, timber and household waste.
As we all focus more attention on reducing waste to landfill through recycling, re-use and recovery, some will still go to landfill. Developing new habits and systems will take time and we won’t capture everything.
So LGI’s landfill division will abate carbon and produce distributed, dispatchable, fast, renewable energy for decades, increasingly, with complementary energy sources and technologies to accelerate the transition to renewables.
Out of sight, out of mind…and
producing biogas for decades.
Landfills exist in every town and city, although some of us may never see one or think about where our waste goes once we put the bin out.
There are more than 1,100 operating landfills in Australia.
Even after being closed, landfills can generate harmful methane gas – a natural by-product as organic materials breakdown – for decades. One of our smaller landfills closed in 1995, still produces enough to supply 1000 homes with renewable power.
For health and environmental reasons this gas needs to be captured and we are doing something good with it.
Beneficial use of biogas from landfills abates carbon and creates dispatchable, renewable energy.
LGI’s systems take biogas from landfills and convert it to carbon dioxide which is 28 times less harmful to the environment. We do this by flaring the biogas or converting it into dispatchable, renewable power to displace electricity produced by fossil fuels and expedite the transition to 100% renewables.
Every year we capture approximately 100 million cubic metres of potentially harmful gas from landfills, which reduces the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere by nearly one million tonnes. To put that in perspective, its environmental benefit could be matched by growing 16 million tree seedlings for 10 years or taking 200,000 cars off the road for a year.
We have proven methods to reduce greenhouse gasses today. Our goal is to increase biogas capture from as many landfills as possible, large and small, to help to save the planet one landfill at a time.
Carbon credits (aka ACCUs) can enable additional carbon abatement with biogas management systems on landfills, which would otherwise not be economically viable. LGI creates carbon credits from these types of small and/or regional landfills. Learn more from this Fact Sheet about how our projects which create additional carbon abatement.
Support the circular economy and reduce waste going to landfill.
We can all help to reduce waste going to landfill by consuming less, re-using more, recycling and separating whatever remains before it goes into the bin. Every little bit helps.
LGI supports the National Action Plan for the Waste Policy to reduce waste going to landfills. It fits our vision for a “clean energy, zero carbon future”.
As we all focus more attention on reducing waste through recycling, re-use and recovery, some waste will go to landfill. So LGI’s landfill division will abate carbon and produce dispatchable renewable energy for decades, increasingly, with complementary energy sources and technologies to accelerate the transition to renewables.
LGI is committed to achieving the objectives of our Environmental Policy by having a positive impact on the environment, leaving our surroundings better than how we found them and providing a positive environmental outlook for generations to come.
