As COP31 comes to Turkey, satellites reveal a landfill methane problem

In the countryside west of Istanbul, trucks line up to empty mixed household waste from the city of 16 million people onto a vast landscape of decomposing rubbish, where landfill gas is captured to ​generate electricity at a nearby plant. But far above the seagulls circling the waste, satellites detect what the plant has failed to capture: methane escaping at a rate that ranks it among the ‌world’s largest recorded landfill emitters.

Methane is the biggest cause of climate change after carbon dioxide (CO2) and is over 80 times more potent than CO2 in its first 20 years in the air. Sharp cuts could therefore slow warming relatively quickly.

The country is the world’s fifth-biggest emitter of methane from solid waste behind China, the United States, Russia and ​Brazil, according to data from non-profit emissions tracker Climate TRACE. Satellite observations analysed by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) identified 70 plumes from Turkey’s 10 highest-emitting waste sites, where average detected rates ranged ​from 841 kg to 7.4 metric tons an hour.