MSW Management | Editorial

SUBSCRIBE

I’m From the Government, and I’m Here to Help

By John Trotti

John Trotti

I spent this past weekend working on my 2007 income taxes, and I have to admit that my upset quotient entered the stratosphere as I pondered my W-2 form’s catalog of taxes that various agencies have zapped right off the top. These, of course, are merely prelude to another round of taxes—sales excise, fuel, property, etc.—reminding me that my life is a partnership having less to do with the needs of my family and me than it does with people I’ve never met. It’s hardly surprising I felt at that moment that a disproportionate percentage of life’s vicissitudes are created by the overzealous actions of people who, through the magic wand of the ballot box find themselves in position to pursue some sort of mandate that the rest of us rarely embrace.

Anyway … while I was building up a high head of steam to brand the whole lot of our public overseers as a bunch of bureaucratic sadists, I happened upon the receipt for my roundtrip flight to Washington, DC, for the 2008 Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) conference earlier this year, and I felt my self-indulgent anarchist bubble pop. “Why should LMOP be different from the rest of the bureaucratic madness,” I asked myself, content to leave TurboTax, the IRS, and my ill feelings for Homeland Security to another time. There was, after all, something incongruous in the distinction I observed between LMOP and the legions of federal programs that defy anyone’s ability to catalog, much less explain.

Then it came to me that people who know what they’re trying to accomplish are able to go about their business in a purposeful and noninvasive way. Leading the parade in governmental cost-effective behavior is LMOP, and if you’re not familiar with the outfit, you should be. It’s a totally voluntary assistance partnership that promotes the use of landfill gas as a renewable, green energy source. No wild-eyed, pie-in-the-sky program, it’s a down-and-dirty, real world, let’s-see-you-get-it-done process that works.

The partnership consists of communities and states, landfill owners and managers, power brokers, and energy consumers, for whom LMOP provides the forum that allows them to interact. It’s means boil down to some telephones, a Web site, an annual conference, several workshops, a handwritten list of landfills and potential projects, and four—yes, you heard it right, four—incredibly active, highly motivated, entrepreneurial staff members.

Taken straight from its Web site at www.epa.gov/lmop, here’s what this mighty host has accomplished:

LMOP has more than 600 Partners that have signed voluntary agreements to work with EPA to develop cost-effective LFG energy projects.

LMOP has developed detailed profiles for over 1,300 candidate landfills.

There are approximately 425 operational LFG energy projects in the United States. In addition, about 120 projects are currently under construction or are exploring development options and opportunities.

To date, LMOP has assisted in the development of approximately 330 LFG utilization projects—including 32 new projects and nine project expansions that went online in 2006. These 330 projects have prevented the release of over 24 million metric tons of carbon equivalent (MMTCE—the basic unit of measure of greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere over the past 12 years.

In the year 2006, all operational LFG energy projects in the United States prevented the release of over 20 MMTCE.

This reduction is the carbon equivalent of removing the emissions from nearly 14 million vehicles on the road or planting nearly 20 million acres of forest for one year.

These reductions also have the same environmental benefit as preventing the use of over 169 million barrels of oil or offsetting the use of over 356,000 railcars of coal.

I find it hard to conceive of a government program in the last 200 years that has accomplished so much, with so few, for so little. Truth is, I’m downright proud to have contributed the relative portion of my taxes to such an enterprise.

MSW - March 2008