Landfills Profit Twice from Waste Residues

Some U.S. landfills managed to turn waste residues into a profitable business, by capturing and selling methane gas that is generated by decomposing trash. A few gas collectors placed at strategic locations throughout major landfills can generate considerable amounts of usable gas, which is then transported to larger suppliers and sold as fuel.
 

But recently, dump managers learned that they could benefit from thousands of dollars in governmental funds, aimed at reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. The trick with this measure is that, while landfills truly rid the air of more pollutants, they are also able to sell "carbon credits" to other people or companies, which sort of makes the whole point of carbon incentives useless.
 

In other words, managing authorities at disposal sites gain extra money by trading carbon credits at stock markets. But these credits have already been funded once, with the dollars the landfills received by selling the methane. Environmentalists say that the policy these sites employ only serves to let more companies exceed their allowed pollution limits. On one hand, disposal sites help reduce the pollution, and, on the other hand, they help encourage it.
 

At the same time, they get paid twice for the same services – first they receive official funding for carbon credits and the second time they get dollars as suppliers of methane gas. This would be fine if the process didn't have serious implications. Large corporations that cannot cope with the carbon emission limits they were subjected to use exchanges such as the Chicago Climate Exchange to buy more carbon credits, thus allowing them to avoid fines or other penalties.
 

But the bottom line is that more and more dangerous carbon gases are released into the atmosphere by companies buying carbon credits. And that's just about to get worst, seeing how an increased number of landfills are starting to adopt this "easy money" system as well. So far, this procedure isn't in any kind of conflict with existing legislation, so it is to be expected that the trend will rise over the next years.