Placing curbs on global warming
burying waste paper and wood permanently locks away large amounts of carbon that if burnt would escape into the atmosphere and speed up global warming. The us now says it wants to include landfills as carbon sinks under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This could lead to countries shovelling away as much carbon waste as they can in the landfills traditionally viewed as environmentally unsound.
Jessie Micales and Ken Skog of the us government's Forest Product Laboratory in Madison, have calculated that landfills in the us lock up 28 million tonnes of carbon a year equivalent to two per cent of annual carbon emissions from burnt fossil fuels. The us government wants to include landfills along with forests as carbon sinks to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide. This would make it easier for the country to meet its Kyoto target of cutting emissions by 7 per cent by 2010.
The us position is that they want to treat the carbon cycle as comprehensively as possible. As a consequence, accounting for the landfill is important, says Bill Hohenstein, an expert on the issue at the us Environmental Protection Agency in Washington dc .
However, Tony Juniper, policy and campaigns director of the environmental group, Friends of Earth says, "Manufacturers are using this as an argument for making more paper and recycling less.' The controversy may come to a head at an intergovernmental policy workshop to be held in the us probably in May 1999.
The workshop will discuss the need to extend national inventories of greenhouse gases to include gases that forests absorb from the atmosphere and those released when deforestation takes place. A key debate will centre around how to account for forest products, such as paper, fibre and wood, that lock up carbon for long periods. Depending on how the rules are drawn up, the piles of waste paper dumped in landfills could soon be judged as valuable to the climate as a pristine rainforest.