Climate Diaries: São Paulo
Climate projects are supposed to be beautiful
That’s often the impression you get. It’s all forests, mangroves, grasslands. It’s all green.
Definitely not orange, or brown, or rusty.
But that was the palette we encountered when we visited a waste project in São Paulo.
Not glamorous, but critical to climate action.
Landfill methane capture can potentially avoid thousands of tonnes of harmful methane from being emitted into the atmosphere.
Landfill Gas to Energy in São Paulo
Tiffany Lopes, Account Executive in BeZero’s commercial team, reflects on her time visiting a waste project in the State of São Paulo, Brazil.
Orizon specialises in treating the municipal waste produced from millions of households in Brazil. The organic component of the collected waste decomposes when in a landfill site, producing biogas. This biogas is rich in methane, a super pollutant with a global warming potential 28 times greater than CO2. Orizon captures this biogas and utilises it for a range of purposes, including generating electricity to power homes and upgrading the gas to biomethane for use in natural grid pipelines. By capturing and transforming this biogas, these facilities avoid the release of thousands of tonnes of methane into the atmosphere.
We met the teams leading social programs, monitoring operations, and managing daily waste collection, which covers a huge share of the city’s waste. What surprised me most was just how many people it takes to make a project like this work. It’s labour-intensive and operationally complex. Seeing how carbon credit revenue can directly support a hive of operations like this one was fascinating.
As team members at Orizon emphasised … they often have to educate buyers about what they call the “less picturesque” types of projects, like waste management.
When you’re stood watching a convoy of trucks dump waste on the ground, it takes some logical thinking to visualise the environmental benefits. However, in terms of tonnes of methane avoided from being emitted, projects such as this one could potentially have a higher climate impact than certain forestry projects which face specific risks to carbon efficacy.
Landfill Methane Capture and Climate Impact
Everyone is responsible for producing waste, yet there are few people who are eager to solve the issue it creates. Rapid urbanisation and population growth have only exacerbated the problems we have with waste generation. With waste projects, you’re confronting the human side of emissions. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary. Landfills aren't just a mountain of waste, they're a mountain of potentially wasted opportunity. The sector has massive carbon potential, and tackling it sustainably through technologies like methane flaring is just as important as protecting forests.
While BeZero’s ratings team is able to gain a clear picture of a project’s carbon efficacy remotely, it’s often the beyond carbon benefits which are really brought into sharp focus by site visits. When you talk to the local community, meet people employed through carbon finance and see how it’s changing lives - you gain a stronger understanding of the real impact the project can have.
“When you talk to the local community, meet people employed through carbon finance and see how it’s changing lives - you gain a stronger understanding of the real impact the project can have.”
For me personally, it humanises the work we do on the commercial side. We talk to developers and buyers every day. Seeing the real impact on the ground makes those conversations more meaningful. It reminds you how critical investment in the carbon markets is to making these projects work.
Visiting this project, and meeting the people powering it, broadened my understanding of what addressing greenhouse gas emissions really means - that it takes many different technologies and approaches, not just nature-based ones.
BeZero Carbon visited São Paulo for educational purposes only. This visit has no bearing on any BeZero Carbon Ratings past, present or future.
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Amazon
Our first Climate Diaries installment sees one of our scientists visit the Brazilian Amazon.