2009-02-24_PWETC_AgendaPacket - Laserfiche WebLink

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- WARM overstates the landfill capture rate at 44"/0, but it actually may be closer to 20% (Anderson, 2006}. - It does not include the upside of composting (replacing petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides}. Other models consider these impacts, but are not as widely-used or accepted as the WARM model. - It does not include all the materials we would like to see in the calculations. - There have been questions raised, about the politically-based decision to measure methane emissions over a 100-year life span. If you measure the emissions over a 20-year life span instead of a 100-year life span. (which is scientifically valid), methane has 70 tines the impact of carbon dioxide, not 23 times as is calculated in WARM (Platt, et al., 2008. pg 7). We believe the use of this calculator is conservative and understates the real impact of waste reduction efforts. However, despite these flaws, the WARM 3nodel is a Lvell- recognized, published calculator. Until a better calculator is peer reviewed and accepted, WARM gives us a conservative starting place to measure these impacts and work towards our goals. Even with WARM, as you will see, the impacts are quite significant. Protocols for climate change calculations Many cities around the country, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul, work with the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI} to quantify the climate change in-rpacts of their city. ICLEI has developed protocols For calculating the carbon. footprint consistent with the Climate Registry. '~'o ensure our protocol matches with the work currently being done, we researched how our quantification fits in with current protocols. A new set of protocols for naeasuring greenhouse gases for cities was recently released in a report by ICLEI. Many local. governments have actively engaged in a variety of programs and activities to reduce waste going to landfills, mainly through recycling anal composting activities. While it is outside of the scope of this Protocol Co provide quantification methodologies to estimate the GHG reductions or benefits associated with these waste-reducing activities, we do plan to explore deve]oping such methodologies as part of the community-level protocol process. Information about your local recycling anal composting activities can be reported optionally (ICLEI, 2.008, pg 85). While the community-level protocol process h.as not happened yet, California Air anal Resources recently conducted a white paper on quantifying greenhouse reductions from recycling and composting. This white paper states that WARM is the best practice to use right now and that it is a conservative approach. 1t states that it does not quantify the full upstream benefits of composting. It stated that they were working on an update to this, but had limited resources (Moore and Edgar, 200$). We were unable to locate anything more recent. Page 13