World's Largest Landfill Gas Plant

Waste Management and Linde North America have announced that they're teaming up to build what will be the world's largest plant for making liquefied natural gas out of the gases released from garbage decomposing in landfills. The partnership is ideal: Waste Management runs numerous landfills, from which they collect plenty of gas. Linde North America is actually a division of a German company (also named Linde) which specializes in engineering gas systems.

The plant will be located at the Altamont Landfill near Livermore, California and is expected to turn out up to 13,000 gallons of natural gas each day — the same stuff, in fact, that Waste Management uses to fuel its garbage collection trucks. Natural gas is one of the cleanest burning fuels available for diesel trucks (there's a relatively simple conversion process needed).

No word yet on future plants, but Waste Management operates one of the largest networks of landfills and has plenty of decomposition gases that the company is willing to process, as well as a commitment to green their garbage collection processes as much as they can. The price tag is surprisingly reasonable ($15.5 million for the plant, which is expected to open in 2009), especially when you take into account the fact that Waste Management is cutting its costs on fueling its collection trucks significantly.