Landfills aren’t sexy, but they’re a huge problem. They emit more greenhouse gas than the entire aviation sector. Half of that is in the form of methane, which is up to 83 times more potent than CO₂ across a 20 year timespan.
In the Global South, landfills are often open pits, flagrantly leaking buckets of methane into the atmosphere, damaging human health, polluting local waterways, and harming biodiversity. In India alone there are more than 3000 legacy dumpsites. Kevin Wheeler hopes his StratX venture can change that.
1. Can you explain your project to me in simple terms?
Landfills and dumps in the solid waste sector emit three times as much greenhouse gas as the aviation sector, if you factor in the global warming potential of methane. That means landfills emit as much greenhouse gas as concrete or steel.
In the Global South, landfills and dumps are often uncovered, and little landfill gas is extracted. It’s just open trash, venting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What we developed with the help of academics and other experts is a simple solution using a soil cover containing natural microbes that eat methane.
2: What makes you unique?
Firstly, we’re trying to address emissions from the solid waste sector at global scale. There’s no real solution to that unless you have massive behavioural change around the world.
Secondly, we’re unique because we’re focusing on landfills in the Global South and no one’s doing that.
Thirdly, we share a component of our revenues with local communities, which is unique for landfill solutions.
Fourthly: our core technology is very robust basic tech which should work just about anywhere. Its simplicity, compared to other climate tech, is rare.
Fifthly: using enhanced rock weathering, which has been done in research labs but hasn’t been deployed at scale yet in landfill settings.
3: Why aren’t others doing this?
We’re not aware of anyone who’s tried this at scale. There are pilot projects that worked just fine. It’s just hard to jump from the lab into the private sector. It takes a lot of investment and a lot of time.
Also: a lot of people just don’t think about landfills! They’re very neglected.
Plus, 10 years ago there was no revenue stream. Now there’s finally optimism around the future of the carbon market. It’s still early days, but that’s another good reason.
4. Why are landfills neglected?
Waste is often out of sight, out of mind in the Global North. I’ve never been to my local landfill. Most entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley aren’t thinking about landfills in Ecuador.
Even methane mitigation has been largely focused on oil and gas fields. But recently we’ve seen a bit of a push towards mitigating landfills.
5: What’s your business model?
It feels really good to be able to help people from different places, especially from the Global South. Many are marginalized, and they’re living in unhealthy environments because of the landfills.
This is a solution that has gigaton-per-year potential. It could put a big dent in global warming. What’s also exciting, and kind of terrifying, is that we have no competition. If we fail, there’s no plan B. That’s part of the excitement, but it’s also kind of scary.
6: What are the barriers to success?
Sometimes the tech works in the lab but deploying it in the field at scale is something else entirely.
It’s also been hard to require landfill operators to install biocovers, so they didn’t have an incentive to do it.
If we fail, it’ll be because operations are hard. Because of the global reach, we have to register in different places, with many different contractors. At scale we’ll have thousands of sites.
7: What stage of the project are you up to right now?
We launched in July, and so far we’ve assessed landfills in Chile, Colombia, and Tanzania, and have more to come.
We’ve looked at the gas flux coming from the landfills, as well as operating conditions, and costs. Once we finalize a site, we conduct an extensive study to quantify exactly how much methane and CO2 is coming out of the ground. From there, we install our covers and focus on detailed measurements going forward. It takes about six months from assessment to installation, and each installation runs for about 10 years, after which methane production usually drops substantially.
8: What’s your end goal? What’s your vision of the ideal outcome?
My vision is that we have sites in every country and jurisdiction where we have a target market. If landfills in the Philippines are a potential for this kind of technology, and we have capacity to deploy there, then we’re there.
My quantitative goal is to take out a chunk of greenhouse gases equivalent to the airline industry. That would have been beyond my wildest dreams a few years ago.
My qualitative goal is to help the tens of millions of people who live next to these dumps. The dumps often catch fire, they cause respiratory problems, and they’re vectors for disease, attracting rats, birds and mosquitos. People deserve better air, better water, and healthier lives.
9: What kind of social, cultural, and political momentum is needed?
When it comes to social momentum, I believe that the communities will be allies once they learn about all the benefits that this tech will bring to the environment of their day to day lives. Culturally, once the tech is deployed, I think the benefits will speak for themselves.
We really need to see the biggest changes in the social and cultural sphere, and we’ll see that when it’s reflected in the carbon markets. If people are buying credits and they’re paying decent prices for them, everything else will fall into place for us. But we need the force of the market to get them onboard.
10: What’s your vision for the future?
I wish people knew how serious the climate problem is, and how urgently we need to take action if we’re going to do anything meaningful about it. There are technical and business solutions that exist and can be deployed today with the right level of public and private support.
