Greenhouse gas emissions from Waste Sector in Argentina in a business as usual and mitigation scenarios

Abstract

The objective of the work was the application of 2006 IPCC Guidelines for the estimation of methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the waste sector in Argentina as a preliminary exercise for GHG inventory development and to compare with previous inventories based on 1996 IPCC Guidelines. Emissions projections to 2030 were evaluated under two scenarios: business as usual (BAU) and mitigation and the calculations were done by using the ad hoc developed IPCC software. According to local activity data, in the business as usual scenario, methane emissions from solid waste disposal will increase by 73% by 2030 with respect to the emissions of year 2000. In the mitigation scenario, based on the recorded trend of methane captured in landfills, a decrease of 50% from the BAU scenario should be achieved by 2030. In the BAU scenario, GHG emissions from domestic wastewater will increase 63% from 2000 to 2030. Methane emissions from industrial wastewater, calculated from activity data of dairy, swine, slaughterhouse, citric, sugar and wine sectors will increase by 58% from 2000 to 2030 while methane emissions from domestic will increase 74% in the same period. Results show that GHG emissions calculated from 2006 IPCC Guidelines resulted lower than those reported in previous national inventories for solid waste disposal and domestic wastewater categories, while were 18 % higher for industrial wastewater.