Americans could be throwing away a lot more trash than government officials estimate according to a new study out of Yale University.
In 2009, the EPA tightened its greenhouse gas reporting rules. For landfills, that meant a requirement to keep better track of their trash.
"They have certified scales at the facility," said Jon Powell, a doctoral student at Yale University. "What happens is a truck comes in. They sit on the scale. It gets weighed. They go to the landfill. They dump the material out, and then they get weighed again. And that delta, of course, is the material that was placed within the landfill."
Powell said that before, there wasn't a requirement to report that weight information, which meant EPA trash estimates relied on bigger-picture sources like, "census information, Department of Commerce information, business activity and other factors," he said, "to ultimately just come up with an estimate nationwide for how much waste is being generated, and within that number, how much is being disposed, how much is being incinerated, and how much is being recycled."
In a new study published in Nature Climate Change, Powell reviewed weight data collected under the new greenhouse gas reporting rules from more than 1,200 landfills.
Comparing those numbers with older EPA estimates, he found the total amount of municipal waste disposed of in the U.S. in 2012 was roughly double what the EPA estimated for that year.
"Is that a surprising result? Yes and no," Powell said. "There have been some previous publications ... where people have gone out and done very rigorous surveys of all the states to find out what's going on and those results did suggest that the annually reported EPA numbers may be low. I think what our study ultimately does is perhaps amplify those previously reported results."
As the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule generates more data sets each year, Powell said the hope is policymakers can leverage that knowledge to encourage greater use of landfill caps and produce more fine-tuned recycling and methane emission goals.
