California Air Resources Board (CARB or Board) staff invites you to participate in a public workshop on preliminary concepts for potential improvements to the Landfill Methane Regulation (LMR). The concepts include but are not limited to increasing the effectiveness of methane emissions control measures at landfills, improving alignment with federal and local requirements, clarifying certain requirements to avoid misinterpretation, and streamlining annual reporting under the LMR. CARB staff welcomes feedback regarding these concepts and any additional suggestions to improve emissions control under the LMR.

Workshop materials will be available on the LMR Meetings & Workshops webpage.

Background

Municipal solid waste landfills are the second largest source of methane emissions in California. Methane is a short-lived climate pollutant and a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG) whose global warming potential is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a 100-year horizon. Human sources of methane emissions are estimated to be responsible for up to 25 percent of current warming. Fortunately, methane’s short atmospheric lifetime of approximately 12 years means that emissions reductions will rapidly reduce concentrations in the atmosphere, slowing the pace of temperature rise in this decade.

The Board approved the LMR in 2010 as one of the first regulations enacted in response to Assembly Bill 32, which charged CARB with reducing statewide GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. CARB’s 2022 Scoping Plan for Achieving Carbon Neutrality lays out a path to achieve targets for carbon neutrality and reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions by 85 percent below 1990 levels no later than 2045. The Scoping Plan identified methane abatement strategies that could achieve direct emissions reductions of 10 percent across the state’s landfills by 2030 through a combination of improvements in operational practices, use of lower permeability covers, advanced landfill gas collection systems, and increased monitoring, including the use of remote and mobile sensing technologies to quickly pinpoint large methane sources and mitigate leaks.