It’s unclear how much methane Canada's landfills are putting into the atmosphere, and that poses a big problem for the country's efforts to mitigate climate change. A team from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia is hoping their work will help.Dave Risk and Nadia Tarraki fire up a laptop in their mobile laboratory to check some of the day’s methane measurements.
The grassy field where Tarakki and Foomajd are driving is a disused landfill outside of Halifax, and the leak they're tracking is methane. It's coming out of wells drilled deep into the pile of long-buried garbage, and being picked up by the sensitive measuring equipment on their black SUV. The lab has received around $1 million for this work from different federal agencies and about $150,000 from the United Nations.
The Flux Lab's 20-person team visited about 145 landfills across Canada to understand methane emissions from landfills of varying sizes under different conditions. This will provide a much better picture than earlier estimates, Risk said. A member of the Flux Lab works on gas analysis equipment that will be carried in the trunk of the mobile lab.
In the 1970s and '80s there were hundreds of unregulated dumps around the region. In New Brunswick alone there were more than 300,In the 1990s, provinces began to move to landfills with more environmental regulations. Some areas began recycling and composting, helping to keep organic materials that create methane out of the landfills. Nova Scotia