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**June 20, 2005**

U.S. Department of Energy - Submitted via Internet

***RIN Number 1901--AB11***

**RE: Revised General Guidelines for the Reporting of Greenhouse Gas
Emissions**

and Emission Reductions Under Section 1605(b) of the National Energy
Policy

Act

Dear Sir or Madam:

The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) is pleased to offer
the following

comments in response to the above-referenced U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) General Guidelines for Reporting of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions
under Section 1605(b) of the National Energy Policy Act, RIN Number
1901--AB11.

SWANA is a not-for-profit association comprised of over 7,000 solid
waste

professionals representative of local governments and private companies
across the U.S. and Canada. SWANA is involved in all aspects of
responsible municipal solid waste (MSW) management practices. SWANA has
an interest in this proceeding as the Association represents a broad
cross-section of public and private MSW landfill owners/operators that
provide waste disposal, landfill gas (LFG) collection and control, and
LFG-to-energy (LFGTE) services to numerous cities and communities across
the country.

There over 1,700 MSW landfills currently in the U.S., with most of them
still active and receiving waste. Each of these sites produces varying
amounts of LFG from the anaerobic degradation of the refuse. This gas
consists of about 50 percent methane (CH~4~), the primary component of
natural gas, about 50 percent carbon dioxide (CO~2~), and a small amount
of non-methane organic compounds. In effect, this methane and CO~2~ are
derived from the carbon material in the wastes being disposed in the
communities that the landfills serve. Landfills are repositories for
this carbon and through LFG collection and control and/or LFGTE, are
significant generators of GHG reductions. In fact, landfills account for
the largest reductions in human-related methane emissions in the United
States and worldwide.

In recognition of this resource and the potential GHG reductions from
landfills, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established
the Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP). LMOP is a voluntary
assistance program that helps to reduce methane emissions from landfills
by encouraging the recovery and use of LFG as an energy resource. LMOP
forms partnerships with communities, landfill owners, utilities, power
marketers, states, project developers, tribes, and non-profit
organizations to overcome barriers to project development by helping
them assess project feasibility, find financing, and market the benefits
of project development to the community. EPA launched LMOP to encourage
productive use of this resource as part of the United States\'
commitment to reduce GHG emissions under the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change. From this Federal program, it is clear
that EPA believes that landfills represent a major source of GHG
reductions.

With the above perspective hopefully putting our situation in context,
SWANA has the following general and specific comments on the proposed
revisions to the 1605(b) reporting program.

## General Concerns

First, in its treatment of waste materials, the DOE guidelines would
establish that the CO~2~ emitted from the management of waste, such as
through combustion, would be considered biogenic and not attributable as
an emission to any facility.  However, if the waste emits methane
through landfilling, the emission is considered anthropogenic and
becomes a net emission from the facility. 

This view of biodegradation would have severe implications for the
operators of landfills, who would become net emitters of climate change
gases, even with LFG collection and control, on the scale of fossil fuel
users.  Imagine, for example, if future public policy imposed a carbon
tax, or required the purchase of offsets to meet mandated reduction
goals (such as is the case for industrial operations under the Kyoto
Treaty, and which is being considered for electricity generators in New
England, New York, and New Jersey under the Regional Greenhouse Gas
Initiative).  In such a scenario, landfills would bear a large portion
of the burden and cost for GHG emissions, simply because they are
managing the waste that every community generates.

In the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the MSW industry's participation
was conditioned on a fairer treatment of landfill emissions, and indeed
landfills are considered zero emitters, partly in consideration of the
biogenic nature of methane as part of the natural carbon cycle, and
partly in deference to the huge store of carbon that remains in a
landfill even after biodegradation.  This latter consideration is a
segue into the second major concern.

DOE\'s approach does not contemplate the landfill being able to take
credit for carbon stores in the landfill because the landfill does not
sequester the carbon, which is defined exclusively as the extraction of
atmospheric carbon.  However, in a logic that defies explanation, wood
product manufacturers, for example, can claim that they are storing
carbon in their products, regardless of what happens to the product
after its useful life, and even though the manufacturer has no
responsibility for post-consumer use, and no decision role in the
ultimate fate of the waste.

The combination of landfills potentially being categorized as net
emitters of GHG with an inability to take some credit for carbon storage
is deeply troubling and creates a poor standard upon which to base
future public policy. 

## Detailed Comments

In addition to the general policy comments discussed above, SWANA has
additional specific comment on the proposed revision to the guidelines:

-   The model that DOE uses to account for carbon movement and emissions
    through the economy is inherently biased against waste management
    operations. This is because the production model carries carbon
    forward in products until a facility emission occurs, thereby
    continually transferring the inevitable emission of a waste product
    in the life cycle to the waste management entity.

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-   Under the proposed program, landfills are not entitled to carbon
    storage credit. However, wood product manufacturers are, but bear no
    responsibility for carbon emissions of their used products during
    the waste management activity of the product lifecycle. The
    statutory language in 1605(b) directs DOE to address carbon storage
    "regardless" of method, but DOE has chosen to narrow its definition
    of sequestration and storage to preclude landfills from accounting
    for landfill storage or carbon.

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-   DOE's treatment of landfills is inconsistent with all other domestic
    and international protocols for landfill methane emissions. Kyoto,
    Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), California Climate Action
    Registry (CCAR), and CCX all treat landfills as carbon neutral and
    allow methane reductions to be treated as offsets for emissions
    external to the landfill.

-   DOE's proposed reduction reporting methodology would consider
    landfill methane emissions without considering reductions, so that
    landfills would be net generators of methane, thereby setting
    precedent that methane reductions only offset the mass methane
    emissions from the landfill and are not available for external use.
    DOE reduction methodology would appear to allow landfills to
    register credit for reductions only for increased methane
    destruction in comparison to the base year, which ignores the LFG
    generation profile of active and closed landfills.

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-   DOE methodology inappropriately treats landfills as industrial
    production facilities with emission profiles similar to electricity
    generation or product manufacture, thereby ignoring fundamental
    differences that call for specialized treatment of waste management
    operations. Landfills cannot "choose" the products they "use" for
    their industrial "process". The waste stream is determined by
    industrial practices and consumer choices beyond the control of the
    waste manager. The waste manager involuntarily inherits the carbon
    profile of the waste stream, unlike electricity-generating units,
    which select the carbon profile of their fuels, or manufacturers who
    choose the carbon profile of their products' constituents or their
    products intended use (i.e., automobiles designed for gasoline,
    diesel, hybrid, etc.).

-   Landfills must operate under strict federal and state regulations,
    designed to protect human health and the environment, which promote
    the anaerobic biodegradation of carbon based wastes. The methane
    emission is a biogenic byproduct of that regulatory choice, and is
    not "intentionally" produced, anthropogenically, by the landfill
    operator by choice of materials managed, or design and operation of
    the landfill. Aerobic landfills (which still produce methane in
    small amounts) create health safety, and nuisance problems that
    anaerobic landfills do not. Methane is an anthropogenic emission
    only in the sense that the waste management practices designed by
    humans promote its generation. However, in every other sense of the
    word, methane is a biogenic emissions caused by the anaerobic
    biodegradation of organic material. The fact that methane has a
    higher global warming potential than CO~2~ is not relevant to the
    biologic nature of the emission in the carbon cycle.

-   DOE's proposed reporting methodology would consider a methane
    reduction as only occurring in its first year, as subsequent years
    reporting may only include additions to the base year's total. This
    process is inconsistent with the fundamental dynamics of methane
    emissions from biodegrading organic matter within a landfill and the
    fundamental purpose of a LFG collection and control system. In
    short, a landfill is in and of itself a pollution control device
    with byproduct emissions, and not equivalent to industrial process
    emissions from electricity or product manufacture.

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-   DOE should identify landfill emissions as carbon neutral and part of
    the general carbon cycle emissions of human society, because:

    -   It would be inequitable to assign accountability to the landfill
        operator for methane emissions merely because he is left holding
        the "carbon bag" so to speak at the end of the product
        lifecycle.

    -   Landfills are significant carbon storers, and that carbon
        storage typically offsets the methane emissions from the
        fraction of carbon that is released as methane. To avoid the
        daunting accounting problems associated with entity wide
        calculations of carbon accounting within the landfill waste
        mass, however, it would be far easier to simply treat landfills
        as carbon neutral.

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    -   Methane generation from organic material biodegradation is
        biogenic.

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-   Treating landfills as carbon neutral is not inconsistent with the
    legislative purposes of 1605(b) or the President's directive. DOE
    and U.S. EPA are still capable of estimating gross methane emissions
    from various sources as part of the overall carbon footprint of the
    U.S. It is not necessary to assign accountability to individual
    facilities to ascertain emission inventory baseline numbers for
    purposes of legitimizing true reductions of carbon emissions.

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-   Landfills gain no "free pass" under a carbon neutral approach.
    Reportable methane reductions would still require capital
    investment, installation, and operation of methane collection and
    control equipment in order to generate reductions. Other policy
    criteria can be applied to address issues of additionality, such as
    regulatory requirements, in any future mandatory program and/or
    trading program for carbon reductions.

## 

## Other Issues

One further issue we have is that the proposed revisions create a
requirement to obtain considerably more information and validation from
larger entities in order to \"register\" reductions. SWANA's review of
this proposal and after discussions with our membership, has led us to
conclude with these onerous requirements, many of our landfills may opt
not to participate in the program, which of course remains voluntary. 
This is especially true for our small public members.

Finally, on a related issue, SWANA also believes that credits should be
owned by the entity

owning the landfill, and we urge DOE to accept this recommendation. More
than half of America's landfills are owned by municipalities and any
benefits associated with these facilities -- including greenhouse gas
emissions credits -- should accrue to the communities that own a
facility. Similarly, private landfill operators that worked to design
and build landfills took on significant risk and are providing the same
service to the community as the public sites, and they should be offered
the reward of operating landfills, which provide significant GHG
reduction. We oppose assignment of GHG credits to either the supplier of

trash or the ultimate purchaser of electricity.

Thank you in advance for consideration of our views. We look forward to
working with

DOE on this very important issue.

Respectfully submitted,

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John H. Skinner, Ph.D.

SWANA Executive Director and CEO