Waste symposium report from Texas

The second Global Waste Symposium took place Oct. 4-6 in San Antonio, Texas, with an announced attendance of about 300. Event topics included methane emissions monitoring, landfill cover performance, solar energy from landfills, and leachate management.

Keynote speaker, Prof. Thomas Christensen from Denmark, gave a presentation on his comparative life cycle analysis (LCA) that he had previously presented at the Copenhagen Climate Conference last year. He said that his LCA confirms that landfills can be greenhouse sinks not sources.

Other technical session presentations were a mixture of academic papers and practical hands-on experience and ran in three streams for the duration of the event, according to reports from the conference.

Of particular interest was a presentation on the use of solar panels on landfill caps, which included a tour of the local Tessman landfill that has flexible solar arrays bonded to the geomembrane cover. (The Tessman Road Landfill near San Antonio was profiled in the August/September 2009 issue of Geosynthetics.)