Imagine tiny organisms that eat our pollution and help reduce emissions. This might sound like something straight out of science fiction, but university researchers are making it a reality.Laura Hug, a researcher at the University of Waterloo, is turning to an unexpected ally buried deep within waste: microbes. These tiny organisms are proving powerful tools in helping in the fight against methane emissions from landfills, which account for roughly 17 per cent of national methane emissions.
In any given landfill, a microscopic war is underway. Some microbes generate methane, while others consume it. Hugs’ research explores ways to use methane-eating microbes to reduce “legacy” methane, the ongoing, long-term gas emissions produced by decades-old organic waste buried deep underground.
“We see organisms that are able to oxidize that methane [break down the molecule],” said Hug, adding that the microbes that produce methane and feed on it are very separate from each other.
“They never see each other. The organisms generating methane are buried in the waste”
Hug leads a research team called Mitigation of Methane Emission Hot-Spots from Municipal Landfills. Her work blends soil science and environmental microbiology to better map and understand emissions from Canada’s landfills. A core focus of the project is reducing legacy and poorly quantified methane leaks from older or active waste sites.
For more than ten years, Hug has been studying landfills across Ontario and the United States. Her lab maintains a decade-long collaboration with the Region of Waterloo’s Division of Waste to collect field samples. However, collecting data at a landfill is delicate; doing it incorrectly can accidentally release the very gas they are trying to track.
“What we do is we sample the liquid that builds up in the landfill. It’s called leachate, and it is developed by organic matter breaking down and rainwater infiltrating,” explained Hug.
Beyond methane, Hug and her team use these leachate samples to develop tools that can transform other pervasive environmental contaminants using natural microbial processes.
“There are organisms that can degrade chlorinated solvents. Things like dry cleaning fluid or degreasing fluid for planes, or [chemicals] electronics are dipped into before they’re sealed, and a lot of older landfills have legacy contamination of these solvents, and they’re toxic,” said Hug.
“They partially degrade pretty readily. But there’s only a few organisms that we’ve found that are able to degrade them to a completely non-toxic end product.”
A more precise understanding of these microbes allows Hug’s team to identify which species are most efficient at destroying methane. The goal is to use these organisms to engineer more effective landfill barriers.
“The idea would be that you would be able to mix these into cover soils and put them onto landfills as you were closing and capping them, so that you were kind of starting from a position of this is your enhanced capacity for methane oxidation at a landfill from day zero,” explained Hug.
When it comes to managing aging landfills, physical engineering options are often limited and expensive, which makes microbes all the more promising as a solution.
“They don’t have a lot of physical engineering options for reducing that methane, but that methane is going to be generated and it will work its way out of the system eventually. So, having more effective cover soils would be a really important layer for controlling methane emissions at these aging landfill [sites],” noted Hug.
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Meg Deak, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Woolwich Observer.