During the day, you hardly ever noticed it, but at night, driving along M-72, you could see the flame glowing from the Glen's landfill. That glow is no longer visible, and at least one viewer wondered, what happened to the flame? The answer is the subject of this Fact Finder.

Laurel Durkin from Waste Management which operates the Glen's landfill says the flame served a pretty simple purpose of getting rid of the excess methane that is produced by rotting garbage. According to Durkin, "we were what we call flaring it. We have a tall tube that burns the methane so you saw a big flare out here before, and that is what was happening with all that methane gas." All that methane gas just going up in smoke more or less. Every landfill, including Glen's Landfill along M-72 has an abundant supply of methane. It's generated by all that decomposing garbage, day after day, year after year, methane, methane, and more methane. For years, landfills have flared it off, by running it through a pipe and burning it off.

A viewer who drove by and saw the flame everyday wondered, couldn't all that energy be used for something? Turns out, it can. In fact, even though it comes from trash, the state sees it as a treasure and has actually defined landfill gas as a renewable energy source.

So it's an endless supply and most landfills, like Glen's, were just burning it off to get rid of it until recently.

You see landfills generate two things, neither one they really want. The first is methane, and the second is leachade, the liquid that accumulates in the big piles of garbage. On average Glen's M-72 landfill produces 40-thousand gallons of leachade a day. It's rainwater and moisture from what's dumped here. In the past Glens would haul it to Frankfort to be treated at the wastewater facility. It was sent to the treatment facility not because it's hazardous, but because they didn't have anywhere to put the tens of thousand of gallons. By law they would be allowed to reapply it to the top of the garbage pile, but there was just too much of it. So Waste Management decided to change the way they do business. Laurel Durkin says "we have an evaporator. This facility will evaporate the leachade that is produced by the garbage in the landfill."

Their new evaporator is fueled by the landfill methane. It uses the heat from burning that gas to flash steam the thousands of gallons of leachade into a super concentrated form. The heat turns most of the water in the leachade into steam leaving behind according to Durkin "a very small residual level which we can then take back out and spray on to the landfill to help break down the garbage."

So it's a win win situation for Glens. Durkin says "we are eliminating trucking all those many thousands of gallons of leachade to the waste water treatment facility and we are using the methane gas from the landfill to power this facility."

Now you maybe wondering what about that steam? What's in it? I was, so I asked if it was tested. Waste Management says "obviously we are held to very high strict regulations and certainly those are tests done. We have to make sure that is safe steam going into the air there is no question about that."

So the new evaporator means, you won't see the old flame from m-72 anymore. It also means fewer big trucks out on the road hauling leachade, and it might mean customers could see prices stabilize. Durkin says "certainly we hope it will help lower costs eventually of course we have this big building and facility so it will take time but absolutely that's our goal."

Glens says they will have the capability in the future to add another burner to the system and double their capacity. There are some landfills across the country that have actually built small power plants on site to use the methane to pump electricity back into the grid for household use but there aren't any of those facilities in Northern Michigan yet.

What do you think? Would you be willing to pay more in landfill costs to fund construction of a methane fueled power plant? Let me know, leave a comment below.