Bogotá’s Doña Juana landfill handles about 2 million tonnes of waste each year. For years, that waste also produced methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that could escape into the atmosphere. In 2009, Bogotá began capturing the landfill gas instead. The first goal was simple: stop methane from freely leaking out. The project later took a more unusual step. The captured gas was used to generate electricity and feed it into Colombia’s national grid. What began as a way to control landfill emissions became a small energy project too. Bogotá was no longer treating its waste only as a problem.
