The Solid Waste Management (SWM) Problem

Latin American and Caribbean region (LCR) is highly urbanized, with on average 75% of its 550 million inhabitants living in cities, mainly large cities, thus leading to the concentration of solid waste and corresponding waste management problems. Most LCR cities still dispose of MSW in open dumps creating problems of leachate contamination of surface and groundwater and release of landfill gas to the atmosphere. The more important and prosperous cities in LCR have begun to improve disposal practice and have introduced sanitary landfills. Even though the issue of treating and reusing LFG emissions has not been widely addressed yet, there are a few cities in the region that actively collect landfill gas, sometimes even utilizing it for energy production. In contrast to this limited beneficial use of LFG in LCR, the experience worldwide is that there are more than 1200 LFG plants for energy purposes. Thus there is a significant opportunity to increase LFG recovery and utilization at landfills in the LCR region, provided that the appropriate market conditions exist.

To tap this opportunity, one first needs to know which are the available resources, and how to better exploit them. The Latin American and the Caribbean Landfill Gas Capture Initiative was thus established by the World Bank, with resources from CIDA - the Canadian International Development Agency - to better assess the LFG potential in LCR and to promote LFG capture in the region through knowledge creation and sharing.

NEXT