At the closed Perdido Landfill in Escambia County, Florida, they’re digging into the past to eliminate old garbage that could contaminate groundwater and clear space for future trash. In the process, they’re also mining for any treasure that could help offset the cost of doing so. During its first phase, which ran from 2009 to 2011, the dig uncovered a copious amount of soil that was then used to cover up new trash, a practice required by federal and state regulations.

The project, which will start phase 2 in 2019 or 2020, is a classic case of landfill mining — an intriguing idea to address multiple growing problems worldwide: increasing population, depleting natural resources and climate change.

“I’m a big proponent of mining landfills,” says Mark Roberts, vice president of engineering consulting firm HDR and project manager for the landfill mining work at Perdido. “Garbage real estate is really valuable.”

The biggest challenge to make landfill mining work is economics, experts say. The cost of excavating trash, sorting out valuable materials such as metals and then reburying the rest tends to exceed the revenues from selling recovered materials.

“Resource recovery alone can’t justify these projects financially,” says Joakim Krook, associate professor in the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University in Sweden. “They need to have alternative benefits.”

However, if alternative benefits such as the value of preventing pollution, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the need to mine new materials, and making room at an old dumpsite for modern, more environmentally friendly waste disposal are factored in, landfill mining in some cases becomes an attractive option.

Making Room

Landfill mining can be traced back to a 1953 project in Israel to find fertilizers for orchards by scooping up soil from decomposed trash.

Few other projects were reported until the 1990s when, in an effort to prevent groundwater contamination and other pollution, new regulation in the U.S. required landfill owners to use plastic liners and soil to sandwich the garbage like a layer cake.

The national effort to modernize garbage dumps shut down many old landfills and required 30-year monitoring of closed dumps for groundwater contamination and methane gas production. It also forced communities to look for new space for landfills.

Digging up closed landfills to make room for new ones has been one of the goals behind some of the landfill mining projects that have sprung up since the 1990s. Other goals include eliminating a potential source of pollution, reclaiming valuable materials and acquiring waste to burn to generate steam and electricity, says Jeremy O’Brien, director of applied research at the Solid Waste Association of North America, an industry trade group.

The U.S. has seen sporadic projects scattered across the country with a variety of primary goals. For example, the main goal of a 1989 project in Connecticut was to move waste from an unlined cell to a lined one, and a 2000 effort in Iowa aimed mainly to protect groundwater and recover space.

Costs and Benefits

The costs and benefits of landfill mining can vary so widely that projects that aren’t deemed cost effective in one place could be considered worthwhile elsewhere.

The city of Denton, Texas, for instance, scrapped a project to excavate a 30-acre (12-hectare) site last year after determining that it wasn’t going to generate nearly as much revenues from selling recyclable materials, such as metals and plastics and creating new landfill space as had been anticipated back in 2015.

In southern Maine, on the other hand, a four-year reclamation work that began in 2011 created an estimated US$7.42 million worth of recovered metals, according to Travis Wagner, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Southern Maine and co-author of a study of the project that was published in the journal Waste Management. A private scrap-metal company contracted with Ecomaine, the nonprofit owner of the landfill, to mine metals from the site.

The project dug up 34,352 metric tons (37,867 tons) of metals at an estimated cost of US$158 per metric ton. In addition to the value of the metals, Wagner pegged the economic value of the newly created landfill space at US$267,000.

The landfill wasn’t your typical garbage pile, however. It was a space reserved for the ash created by a nearby incinerator that vaporized trash from the regular landfill onsite, such as auto parts and mattress springs, to produce electricity. The process creates the ash with a concentrated amount of metals.

The ash also contains metals that are uniformly distributed in the pile. The metals included steel, silver, copper and aluminum.

“At a regular landfill, the metals aren’t uniform, and to get to the metal, you have to get rid of a lot of nasty crap and rocks. It’s expensive to process that waste,” Wagner says. “If you want to mine something, you want to know exactly what the metals are and their concentration.”

Soil and Space

The Escambia County project dug up mostly soil made from decomposed organic materials mixed with dirt used to cover the garbage. Roberts says the soil is valuable because it could be used to cover trash in the adjacent, active part of the landfill. Reusing the soil reduces the need to buy and truck in soil from elsewhere. The ability to rebury unwanted trash in the newer section of the landfill also helped to lower the project’s cost.

“A lot of the economics of it is due to transportation — you don’t have to haul mined garbage across the county,” Roberts says. Even so, the soil was only the second-most valuable item recovered. First was the room for more garbage. “The value is not necessarily in the recovered materials. It’s the air space you will gain — that’s worth a fortune,” he says.

The first phase of the project cost US$2.7 million in mining and processing the long-buried waste, and another US$3 million to build new landfill space of 2.8 million cubic yards (2.1 million cubic meters), Roberts says. That new space will bring in US$60 million in fees charged to haulers. Overall, the return on the investment is at least fivefold, he says.

Similarly, a 2015 project in Washington State didn’t generate a lot of money from recovered metals, mostly unidentifiable rusty pieces, but it cleared out space for a new stormwater detention pond and created a new landfill space, or cell, in the pond’s former location.

“It was not a spectacular success in terms of recovering resources. However, we did successfully relocate the waste into a modern cell to mitigate risk to the environment,” says Pat McLaughlin, director of solid waste division for King County, which operates the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill. “We were able to upgrade our stormwater detention system and increase landfill capacity in the new cell.”

The project took place in part of Cedar Hills that began burying trash in the 1970s, next to an area built to modern standards. The project provided good lessons for the county to experiment with excavating and relocating old garbage, an undertaking that could be under consideration in the future, McLaughlin says.

Shifting the Balance

Currently landfill mining projects are few and far between. However, some see that due to change.

A good number of academic and government-funded research projects in Europe, including in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden and Germany, are working to shift the cost-benefit balance of mining materials from landfills by bringing down the sorting costs and factoring in the value of the environmental benefits that can be gained. Projects range from improving the technology for sorting and recovering materials to calculating environmental benefits, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, from using previously mined materials, says Krook.

Available landfill space plays a role, too. Trash generation is rising globally and projected to increase by 70 percent and reach 3.4 billion metric tons (3.7 billion tons) per year by 2050, according to the World Bank. The upward global trend is echoed in the United States, which has seen the amount garbage from cities and counties grow from 217.3 million tons (197.1 million metric tons) in 1995 to 262.4 million tons (238.0 million metric tons) in 2015, the most recent data available, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Right now, I would generally say that there’s a lot of landfill capacity out there. When supply starts to dwindle then you will see more interest in this,” O’Brien says.

While landfill mining can create values beyond pure profits, for now the waste management industry is paying more attention to solving sustainability problems through promoting recycling and other efforts that divert trash from landfills.

“It always seems silly that we put in all this energy to produce these materials and goods, and then we dispose perfectly good materials,” Wagner says.

“Meanwhile, we are mining and producing more virgin materials.”

O’Brien echoes the sentiment. “Once we stop new materials from reaching landfills, then we can focus on reclaiming old ones,” he says.

This story was originally published in Ensia.

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Can autonomous cars be a boon for the environment?

The transportation sector is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for 27 per cent of the harmful gases emitted into the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. On the road, cars in the U.S. guzzle about 2 billion barrels of oil each year.

Research results, some of which are rooted in a future that doesn’t yet exist, project bold environmental benefits — from fuel economy improvements of more than 50 per cent for cars and trucks to lowering vehicle carbon emissions by more than 90 per cent in scenarios that call for replacing personal cars with robo-taxis. But reaching such significant environmental benefits will mean big changes to the current way of doing things.

Before we are able to create vast networks of autonomous taxi fleets to squeeze the biggest benefits out of automation, we will likely see smaller fuel savings and emissions reductions as automation reduces or eliminates inefficient human driving habits in each passenger car and truck. But the benefits won’t come only from the performance of individual cars. They also will be connected to the creation of a wireless communication network that enables robotic vehicles to relay and receive information that helps them operate efficiently.

“If you have a fully autonomous car that talks to other cars and traffic signals, then it can drive more smoothly, much better than a human can, and there will be fuel economy benefits coming out of that,” says Dave McCreadie, Ford Motor’s general manager of electric vehicle infrastructure and smart grid.

Within reach

Autonomous car research has been around for more than four decades, but the concept now appears within reach, thanks to today’s faster and smarter computers. Executives at Nissan, Tesla Motors and Google have talked about launching autonomous cars in the next five years. and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers predicts they will make up 75 per cent of vehicles on the road by 2040.

Cars already are becoming increasingly automated with features such as blind spot detection, GPS mapping and assisted parking, where the car parallel parks on its own. And carmakers are experimenting with various image-capturing technologies to equip a car with the ability to scan its environment and make good driving decisions, which is what carmakers point to — not the environmental benefits — as the reason they are interested in developing robotic vehicles. If the car can make better decisions than a human driver, then it will be able to better avoid accidents.

Still, many of the technology and pilot projects carmakers are working on offer the promise of environmental benefits, even if those are not the primary goals. Key research themes — designed mostly to deliver safety, convenience and comfort — include advancing the use of sensors and software to eliminate unnecessary acceleration and braking, relay traffic data to help cars find the quickest routes, minimize extra driving to find parking, and dispatch and manage a taxi fleet to more efficiently get cars to customers and customers to their locations. All this helps cars achieve greater fuel economy and eliminate unnecessary or excessive driving and its associated emissions.

Getting personal

For personal cars and trucks, automation could deliver around 15 per cent in fuel savings by maintaining optimal speed and avoiding excessive stop-and-go or idling, according to a paper by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Maryland. Meanwhile fuel efficiency could be boosted more than 30 percent by enabling cars to communicate with each other in a way that eliminates the need to stop and go at intersections, according to research published by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

“People are always driving somewhat inefficiently because they are constantly pushing the accelerator pedal and then backing off. People usually brake more rapidly than would be optimal,” says Dave McCreadie, Ford Motor’s general manager of electric vehicle infrastructure and smart grid. “When you have cars that can anticipate traffic lights and operate safely, then you can get a smoother operation of the vehicles from the fuel economy perspective.”

Technology already exists to help drivers gain some of those fuel savings. So-called “eco mode,” available in many cars today, makes little, automatic tweaks to the car’s performance to use energy more efficiently, delivering up to 10 per cent fuel savings. But that’s only if the drivers are willing to turn on the function, which can make the car feel sluggish.

Relaying traffic information to help cars find the quickest routes or parking also leads to fuel savings of around 5 percent, according to the NREL paper, while also having a measurable impact on traffic management in big cities. On average, about 30 percent of the cars roaming urban streets could be looking for curbside parking, according an analysis of 16 studies of 11 cities, including New York, London and San Francisco.

In one project, Ford and Georgia Institute of Technology are developing sensors and cameras on a car that take note of empty parking spots it drives by and relays that information to other drivers nearby who need to park, McCreadie says. Another project is testing a “virtual valet” service in which a car remotely drives itself to a parking garage after the driver steps out

Better big rigs

Some of the ideas for saving fuel and reducing carbon footprints require a less complex technology, regulations and human management behind the scenes.

Take the concept of platooning, where cars or trucks follow each other closely at a constant speed, reducing air resistance, or drag, which improves fuel economy. Humans aren’t so good at maintaining a safe distance over a long haul, and having a series of vehicles following each other safely presents an even greater challenge.

A 2013 study by the North American Council for Freight Efficiency exploring the advantage of platooning in semi trucks demonstrated fuel savings of 4.5 per cent for the lead truck and 10 per cent for those that followed (when the trucks are in the platoon formation; overall fuel conservation for a truck from start to finish would be lower). The experiment automated the platooning function by installing radar-based sensors — to monitor speed and distance — and wireless communication equipment in regular trucks to allow them to maintain a 36-foot distance.

Big rig fleet owners are keen to find any meaningful way to save fuel, which can account for nearly 40 per cent of a fleet’s operating cost. Heavy-duty trucks account for only 4 per cent of the registered vehicles on the road but about 25 per cent of the fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector.

Creating platoons of big rigs across America’s highways will require fleets from different companies to communicate with each other, meaning common technical standards for communication equipment and universal protocols will be crucial. If it works out, the final result will be something that resembles freight trains on highways.

“You need enough critical mass and market impetus for these companies to share open data,” says Jon Walker, manager of the transportation group at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable resource management. “It should be like the Internet, where everybody wants to be able to do this.”

Robo taxis

Perhaps the biggest environmental benefit that can be gained from smart cars involves breaking up the car ownership culture and replacing it with a seamless and affordable autonomous taxi service that dispatches robots to whisk people to their destinations, whether work or a weekend getaway, picking them up and dropping them off much as a bus would, but with personalized, convenient stops.

About 96 per cent of the cars on the road are privately owned, notes Jeffery Greenblatt, a scientist in the sustainable energy systems group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These personal cars are parked and unused 95 per cent of the time on average. Because they would reduce the need for individual car ownership, autonomous electric taxis would make a big dent in carbon emissions tied not only to car use but also to car manufacturing, says Walker. Also, in an automated fleet of ride-sharing vehicles, managers can program fueling, dispatch, mapping and driving schedules and operations more efficiently than human drivers can — not only making autonomous taxis a convenient option for consumers, but also reducing overall miles traveled and so carbon emissions.

“We see automated mobility as a service,” Walker says. “You can sign up for a mobility service and get a pickup truck for going to the hardware store, an SUV for going to the mountains and a cozy one for going to work. By 2030, not many people will own any cars at home.”

Greenblatt recently co-authored a paper to quantify the environmental benefit of running fleets of autonomous taxis. His modeling shows that the use of autonomous electric taxis powered by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, could lead to an 87–94 per cent cut in per-mile greenhouse gas emissions. The modeling also assumes that taxi operators will dispatch a greater variety of vehicles to meet personalized demand — smaller and lighter cars that require less fuel for one or two passengers and larger cars for more people and cargo — thereby lowering fuel use and emissions.

Reducing carbon emissions through the use of autonomous taxis will face significant challenges, however. Improving battery technology to extend electric cars’ range and having a broad network of fast-charging stations will be crucial for long-distance travel and for convincing consumers that they could ditch their own cars without sacrificing convenience and comfort.

Changing the current taxi business model will also be necessary. Walker points out that because taxi owners pay for the cars while the drivers pay for the fuel, owners have little incentive to pay for, say, a Tesla Model S, even though driving a Tesla today should cost less for a taxi driver than operating a gasoline car. He’s working on putting together pilot projects to prove that. Meanwhile, Uber is testing a fleet of BYD electric cars in Chicago.

Overall, autonomous car technology promises to deliver significant environmental benefits. The questions is whether those benefits will be realized and at what pace. That’s difficult to say, says Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley.

“Scientists use simulation and a lot of assumptions in their models in order to predict what the savings would be,” he says. “The question remains if the assumptions are correct. First we have to develop the technology, and once we can prove that it works, then we will study how to use this technology to accomplish efficiency.”

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The Toronto-based company, founded in 2000, has built 45 megawatts of projects at over 200 school sites across Ontario. It’s working on installing another 45 megawatts at hundreds more, says Potentia chief executive Daniel Argiros.

The company’s business model is simple: lease the rooftops, equip them with solar energy equipment, and sell the clean electricity to the province through a 20-year contract with Ontario’s power authority. In exchange, the school gets its roof fixed or shares in the revenue.

“The school projects have been phenomenal,” says Argiros. “The school boards win financially, the students get an education about renewable energy generation and everybody is happy.”

Figuring out how to make solar energy lucrative for investors and affordable for consumers and businesses has been a big challenge for North America’s solar energy market over the past decade. But a combination of tax credits, rebates, mandates for utilities to buy more clean energy, and long-term leases, has led to falling costs and stronger growth.

At the same time, with solar slowly shedding its image as a risky investment, more banks are offering loans to homeowners for buying solar panels. Investment vehicles, such as green bonds or securities backed by solar energy installations with long-term power purchase contracts, have also emerged over the past year and are being marketed as reliable sources of income.

In Ontario, for example, a co-operative called SolarShare has sold $10 million worth of five-year community bonds that are RRSP-eligible and which return 5 per cent annually. Anyone can buy them, and proceeds have so far resulted in construction of projects totaling 3.4 megawatts.

“The RRSP eligibility has been a game changer,” says Julie Leach, community investment manager at SolarShare. “We’re pretty excited.”

Incentive question looms

The United States is third in the world when it comes to the annual installation of solar power generation capacity. China and Japan rank first and second, respectively, while Canada ranks 14th.

Annual installation of solar systems in the United States has jumped from a measly four megawatts in 2000 to 6,201 megawatts in 2014, according to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Cumulative capacity sits at 20 gigawatts – roughly equivalent to 40 mid-sized coal-fired power plants.

In Canada, solar energy development has been concentrated in Ontario, where pro-solar policies have been a major driver of growth. The Canadian Solar Industries Association hasn’t finalized country data for 2014, but between 2000 and 2013 total capacity grew from about seven megawatts to nearly 1,210 megawatts, with 445 megawatts added in 2013 alone. GTM Research expects that annual contribution will climb to 880 megawatts by 2020.

In the U.S., the fate of a generous 30 per cent federal tax credit that can offset solar project costs looms over the market. That credit is expected to fall to 10 per cent starting in January 2017. The solar industry is lobbying to extend it, but there’s no certainty Congress will do so.

As a result, developers are rushing to complete their projects by the end of 2016, even if their 20- or 25-year power purchase agreements don’t kick in until much later. In such a situation, they’ll try to sell the power through short-term contracts.

GTM Research is forecasting the annual installation in the U.S. will shoot up to nearly 12,000 megawatts in 2016 before diving 57 per cent in 2017. Projects built for utilities or to sell power to utilities will be the hardest hit. “The U.S. will undergo a transition over the next few years, moving away from relying on the investment tax credit,” said Adam James, a GTM analyst.

Growth, which should pick up after 2017, will start to depend more on state mandates that require utilities to buy more renewable energy and policies that make solar a financially attractive alternative to conventional energy for homes and businesses.

Bust that fueled the boom

A big decline in solar panel pricing is boosting market growth, too. But it has come at the expense of dozens of manufacturers that went bankrupt or sold their business cheaply. Those companies include Q-Cells, once the largest solar cell manufacturer in the world, and a slew of venture capital-funded startups trying to bring to market solar cells that use compounds other than the dominant silicon.

The most prominent of them all was Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy in September 2011 after securing a $535 million federal loan and used most of it to build a large factory.

Solyndra’s demise was a warning sign that supply was exceeding demand in the global market. Declining government subsidies and a weak economy contributed to that imbalance. But the glut continued for several more years and led to trade disputes in the U.S. and Europe, which accused Chinese manufacturers of flooding the market with solar panels at below fair-market prices.

The U.S. government has since imposed different sets of duties, which reached as high as 250 per cent, on solar cells and panels coming from China and Taiwan. In March of this year, the Canadian government approved provisional tariffs as high as 286 per cent against Chinese manufacturers while it investigates claims that the companies are selling at below cost. Ontario-based Canadian Solar also faces the sanction because it has a big manufacturing operation in China, in addition to running factories in Canada.

“These artificial trade barriers, which we think are unjustified, will have to be removed if the government wants” to see the market grow, said Michael Potter, Canadian Solar’s chief financial officer.

The average wholesale price for solar panels worldwide plunged 40 per cent from $1 per watt in 2011 to $0.60 per watt in 2014, according to GTM. The market research firm expects that price will fall to $0.50 per watt by the end of 2018. The tariffs, however, have pushed up the price of Chinese solar panels sold into the U.S. by 14 per cent over the past two years, from $0.63 per watt at the start of 2012 to $0.73 per watt during the first quarter of this year.

Despite the tariffs, Chinese manufacturers remain the top suppliers to the world and North America. Half of the top 10 solar panel makers hail from China, including Trina Solar, Yingli Green Energy and JA Solar, according to IHS Technology. Canadian Solar is on the list, too.

Manufacturers: their own best customers

Canadian Solar has shifted over the past six years from being solely a solar-equipment maker to also being a project developer. Its transformation reflects the evolving identity of many well-known solar panel manufacturers globally that sought to diversify as competition intensified and profit margins began to thin.

China’s launch of the “Golden Sun” initiative in 2009 kick-started the country’s solar energy market and prompted many of its domestic manufacturers to expand into the project development and construction business. SunPower and First Solar, the two largest American solar panel makers, had become project developers before that.

Canadian Solar has set sight on the U.S. for its project development business and bought Recurrent Energy from Sharp for $265 million. The acquisition came with four gigawatts of projects under development, three gigawatts of which are expected to be completed within three years, Potter said. Canadian Solar is interested in large projects that have at least several megawatts of generation capacity, so it’s not so keen on rooftop installations.

That doesn’t mean the rooftop market isn’t a shining light, at least in the United States. Residential solar, for example, has enjoyed a growth spurt over the past five years and is set to make up a greater portion of the U.S. market starting in 2017. The use of power sales contracts, in which homeowners pay for the solar electricity but not the equipment, has been a big market booster. Many consumers like the idea of not having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a solar PV system, when all they really want is the solar power it generates. Depending on the state, the cost of that solar power is equal to or less than what the consumer pays for grid electricity.

About 1.2 gigawatts of residential solar projects in the U.S. were completed in 2014, the first time a gigawatt has been exceeded in a single year. Over 50 per cent of that market is covered by just five companies: SolarCity, Vivint Solar, Sungevity, Sunrun and Verengo Solar. SolarCity, a public company, is the largest and takes up 34 per cent of the share in this segment. Vivint Solar follows at No. 2 and went public on the New York Stock Exchange last October.

SolarCity, whose chairman is high-profile Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, has excelled in buying and developing technology, such as racks for mounting solar panels, to reduce the time and money it takes to sign up customers and complete installations.

The California developer is also a trailblazer at creating financial products to attract investors. It completed the first securitization of rooftop solar assets in 2013, selling notes to investors and paying interest with money generated from long-term power sale contracts signed with homeowners. Last year, SolarCity launched an online portal that allows it to sell “solar bonds” directly to consumers.

Solar’s storage boost

SolarCity is also ahead of its main rivals in testing the emerging energy storage market. The company has been marketing lithium-ion battery systems assembled by Tesla Motors to home and business owners. As part of a pilot program, the companies have already equipped 300 homes and introduced a solar-storage combo to 11 Wal-Mart stores in California.

At an event at the end of April, Tesla and SolarCity officially announced the new storage product – two, in fact: one for homeowners and one for utility-scale projects. Musk has said that within five to 10 years every solar PV system installed by SolarCity will be combined with energy storage, which will come from a massive new battery manufacturing facility Tesla is building in Nevada.

Competitors such as SunEdison, which purchased the startup Solar Grid Storage in early March, are also moving in this direction. It signals a new phase of growth for the solar market and potentially a major threat to utilities.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted last fall that the sun could be the world’s largest source of electricity by 2050, generating 27 per cent of the planet’s power. Enabled by energy storage and benefitting from economies of scale that continue to lower costs, that forecast is far from an exaggeration.

On the contrary, based on the IEA’s miserable record of predicting the growth of renewable energy, its forecast is likely low-balling the potential of solar.

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