Waste-management seminars and the waste management journals exploded with discussions of recycling and composting. Their efforts are mutifaceted. Masada already has a project underway in Middletown, New York, to convert municipal waste in this way. Other pioneers are rethinking the structure and management of landfills in order better to tap their latent potential to generate marketable methane gas. So-called bioreactor landfills speed up degradation of refuse.
Proponents tout bioreactor landfills as yielding multidimensional benefits.
Faster methane generation makes methane recovery more cost effective. It also could reduce the landfill postclosure maintenance period from 30 to 60 years down to less than 15 years, since bioreactors more quickly stabilize the buried refuse. In North Carolina, the DCI Group is embarking on construction of several ethanol plants. Though agricultural products will provide much of the feedstock, biomass refuse make also become part of the input into the plant. Politics, however, may interfere with entrepreneurial dynamics in the form of both barriers and ill-considered promotional efforts.