Fugitive Methane Emissions from Landfills: Field Comparison of Five Methods on a French Landfill

The study presented in this paper has been initiated by the Veolia Environment research center for waste management and supported by the French Environmental Agency. A comparison of five field-scale measurement methods for measuring fugitive methane emissions has been conducted on a French landfill site. The five methods evaluated consisted of a tracer gas technique, laser radial plume mapping, inverse modeling technique, differential absorption light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and helicopter-borne spectroscopy. These methods are evaluated on their abilities to measure emissions from a practical user-oriented aspect (metrological, technical, and economical criteria). High disparities in terms of quantitative results and applicability were observed from all methods. Techniques that used Gaussian dispersion modeling appeared less applicable to landfill sites due to topographic complexity and did not provide high confidence in the results. However, the method using optical remote sensing (radial plume mapping) methods showed that a spatially detailed analysis is achievable (cell level), and the LiDAR method showed very promising approach and technical performances.