Economic externalities and urban solid waste in Mexico

Abstract

In the last century, garbage has been considered as an energy resource, on one hand, because when it is deposited in landfills or dumbs it produces biogas with a major component of methane (more than 50%), methane is considered as a greenhouse gas that has negative impacts on the environment. On the other hand, garbage could be treated in thermochemical processes of incineration or gasification, resulting in energy generation that could be by vapor generation in the case of incineration, or a mixture of gases mainly composed by CO2, H2, and CH4 by the gasification process; The last two gases could be used to generate vapor as well or used as fuel in internal combustion engines or fuel cells in a near future. The information obtained from the urban solid waste in Mexico is limited concerning to the inventories of generation, on the volume estimation of handling and disposal, according the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI by the initials in Spanish), from the Municipals Governments National Census until July 2016, Mexico City occupies the first place in recollection of urban solid wastes generating 16 tons daily, the second one is Mexico State with 13 tons, Jalisco with 6.9 tons and Veracruz with 6 tons, on average Mexico generate 42 millions of tons of urban solid waste per year, and only 38% are organic waste. As a result of the complexity of handling urban solid waste, this paper presents a study in situ of the exploitation of biomass within an organic fraction of urban solid wastes, by means of biogas estimation in a landfill with potential to be exploit in clean energy generation, transforming the negatives externalities because of the disposal of urban solid wastes into positive externalities due to the utilization of the calorific potential from the biomass.