Biogas plant rises in Payatas
By Beverly T. Natividad
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:11:00 05/03/2008
Filed Under: Environmental Issues, Energy, Government
MANILA, Philippines -- An old problematic garbage dump will soon be churning out money as an environmental facility.
In only one year, the Quezon City government has taken the lead in environmental activism in the city level by turning the Payatas dump into the country’s biggest biogas emissions reduction facility.
Sitting on a 1,500-square-meter portion of the Payatas dump, the Quezon City Controlled Disposal Facility was inaugurated by Mayor Feliciano Belmonte on Thursday.
“Positive factor na ang Payatas ngayon. People now have good words for it,” Belmonte said in a statement.
The facility is now one of 17 local projects registered with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) based in Bonn, Germany.
The disposal facility is designed to capture methane from the waste dumped at Payatas to generate as much as 42,000 megawatts of electricity over a 10-year operating life.
The methane will be sold in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) trade.
The CDM was established in 1997 under the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement which requires industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) beginning in 2008.
The CDM is supposed to give industrialized nations the flexibility to go beyond geographic boundaries to comply with the requirements of the international agreement.
Thus, the carbon trade scheme allows developed nations to buy carbon credits from developing ones.
The Payatas facility, which is estimated to capture the equivalent of 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide, is currently the biggest biogas emissions reduction facility registered with the UNFCCC for the CDM trade.
The emissions that are reduced by the Payatas dump will help Italy meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol.
Joyceline Goco, head of the International Committee on Climate Change (IACCC) secretariat at the DENR-attached Environmental Management Bureau (EMB), said in an interview the IACCC was currently processing 77 applications for environmental projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and take part in the carbon trade.
The Payatas facility, she said, is the first municipal solid waste recovery facility in the country. Before it, methane-recovery projects registered mostly involved hog farms.
Small hog farms, however, can only churn out two to 10 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent compared to the Payatas facility’s 116,000 tons.
The Payatas dump has been the scene of many accidents, mostly involving the people who pick through the trash and are allowed to live there. Several years ago, one side of the mountain of garbage collapsed, killing scores whose bodies remain in the gigantic mound to this day.
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