[stephengillie]

I found a case study about Oslo's waste management strategy: http://www.c40cities.org/c40cities/oslo/city_case_studies/wa...

The study emphasizes their focus on composting for food products and recycling everything else, so a minimum of waste needs to be incinerated or dumped. Also, Oslo closed their landfill in 2007, and it seems they burn the residual gasses (methane?) for electricity, if not burning all of their old trash. The report focuses on home recycling requirements, but does not mention commercial or industrial waste, which are by far larger generators of waste.

So, it seems likely that the incinerated waste is not "in-system".

[jlgreco]

Surely burning that methane is "in-system". Methane has a 20-year GWP of 72 and, unless my chemistry is far more rusty than I think it is, 1 mol of methane will burn with oxygen to form 1 mol of CO2. From a global warming standpoint, it would actually be wildly irresponsible to not burn that methane. In fact this seems to be the basis for the EPA's "Landfill Methane Outreach Program".

[niels_olson]

What's GWP? See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential

[jlgreco]

Aye. This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential#Values) chart is important to consider too. I gave the 20-year GWP value for CH4, but CH4 does not last as long in the atmosphere as CO2 so that value drops as time progresses. However even the 500-year GWP for CH4 is still above CO2.