CARY, N.C. - Scientists meet this week in Cary to debate whether the Environmental Protection Agency's current standards for particulate matter and ozone air pollution are robust enough to protect public health.

The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee also will hear public testimony about the air-pollution standards.

John Bachmann, former associate director for science and policy at the EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, said the agency reviews the standards for six air pollutants every five years.

"These standards for particulate matter were part of the original Clean Air Act, and they were established in 1971," he said. "They have been revised periodically, and they were revised in a big way in 1987 to change the definition of 'particulate matter' to just particles that you can breathe."

The committee also is accepting written comments. The EPA is expected to make a decision on changing the standards sometime next year.

Millions of Americans live in counties where breathing the air is linked to increased risk of lung cancer, early death and other health problems. Bachmann said particulate matter is so fine that there's no way to avoid inhaling it.

"EPA has previously determined there is a causal relationship between fine particles and mortality, hospital admissions and some other effects," he said.

Because of the Clean Air Act, Bachmann said, some regions have made noticeable improvements in air quality.

"I'll tell you, much of the eastern United States has seen a dramatic improvement in air quality, and if you look at pictures of what the sky look used to look like in Ohio - especially near the Ohio River Valley in the '80s - and compare it to today, there's no comparison," he said. "It's much, much better. I drive through there all the time."

An independent panel of scientists recently concluded that the EPA's current standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter for fine particulates isn't enough to protect human health, but Bachmann predicts the EPA is likely to maintain that the current standards are sufficient.

More information is online at federalregister.gov.

Reporting by North Carolina News Connection in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the Park Foundation


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Oregon's new state budget cuts funding for programs intended to protect residents from extreme weather and make renewable energy more accessible.

Climate justice advocates said it is a major setback after years of progressive climate policies.

Ben Brint, senior climate program director for the Oregon Environmental Council, is disappointed to lose funding for the Community Renewable Energy Grant Program, which supports a variety of projects tailored to communities, including microgrids and solar storage.

"We felt legislators didn't fund climate resilience programs while fires are raging, people's houses are burning down and the state has already experienced record heat waves in June," Brint pointed out. "Legislators don't see we are in an actual climate emergency and chose inaction."

Brint said the grant program aimed to help low-income, rural and communities of color, those most impacted by climate disasters. Lawmakers attributed the cuts to budget shortfalls and uncertainty over federal funding.

Joel Iboa, executive director of the Oregon Just Transition Alliance, said the Community Resilience Hub program, which creates networks as well as physical places to protect people from extreme cold, heat and smoke also lost funding this session. He argued the hubs are effective because communities design them to meet their unique needs.

"Whether it be a place to plug in your phone or a place to go get diapers or get an air conditioner or whatever your community may need," Iboa outlined. "Depending on what's going on."

A heat pump program for rental housing, aimed at making energy-efficient heating and cooling more affordable, was also cut this session.

Brint added he realizes legislators have to make tough decisions about how to fund health care and housing but emphasized climate change is connected to those issues.

"When we're talking about heat pumps or the C-REP program, we're talking about people's health and livelihoods and saving lives in the face of climate fueled disaster," Brint stressed.

Brint added since climate change is not going away, the movement to push for climate resilience will not either.


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A new Colorado law aims to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires by providing financial protection for trained and certified individuals to safely manage prescribed burns.

Low-intensity prescribed burns can remove hazardous fuel sources such as brush piles, dead or dying vegetation, leaf litter and small trees.

Parker Titus, Colorado fire program manager for The Nature Conservancy, said fire practitioners have been reluctant to take on projects in Colorado, even though fewer than 1% of all burns spread beyond established parameters.

"Liability concerns are a major barrier to the use of prescribed fire," Titus acknowledged. "Lack of attainable insurance dissuades many fire-trained and qualified individuals from using this proven tool."

Senate Bill 7 creates a new prescribed fire liability claims fund to act as a safety net for certified burn managers, which can include private landowners. The bill also creates an easier pathway for burn managers with previous training, experience and certifications in other states to be certified in Colorado.

Paul Cada, wildland battalion chief for Vail Fire and Emergency Services, said in order to truly mitigate catastrophic wildfire risks, efforts must be scaled up on orders of magnitude, and bringing in more people who can do the work safely is a step in the right direction. He estimated Colorado's current capacity to clear excess fuel stores is somewhere around 1% of what's actually needed.

"While this is not the silver bullet that gets us up to 100% capacity," Cada pointed out. "Anything that we can do to add capacity is certainly going to help."

Fire is a natural event on landscapes and Indigenous peoples have used prescribed burns to keep forests and grasslands healthy for centuries.

Rebecca Samulski, executive director of the nonprofit Fire Adapted Colorado, said ecosystems depend on occasional fires to rejuvenate soil and make space for vegetation wildlife depend on.

"Those fires are essential for returning nutrients to the ground and opening up the canopy so that the sun can get through and grasses can grow and flowers can grow," Samulski explained.

By Nina Misuraca Ignaczak for Planet Detroit.
Broadcast version by Chrystal Blair for Michigan News Connection for the Planet Detroit-Public News Service Collaboration.

Darwin Baas surveys Kent County’s landfill from the cab of a county truck, watching the steady arrival of waste-hauling vehicles dumping drywall, sofas, home clean-outs, and bagged leftovers tumbling out by the ton. An average of 800 of these trucks arrive every day. The South Kent Landfill — just outside Grand Rapids — is now about 95% full.

“Everything up here is going to try to kill you,” he tells visitors, gesturing toward the trash compactors and bulldozers weaving between soft spots of shifting debris. But it’s not just the machinery that makes this place dangerous — it’s the system itself, designed to make waste disappear with maximum convenience and minimum cost.

Baas, director of Kent County’s Department of Public Works, has spent the last 11 years trying to bend that system in a new direction. Under his leadership, Kent County has voluntarily captured methane from its landfill, continued to operate Michigan’s only municipal waste-to-energy incinerator, and proposed an ambitious Sustainable Business Park to divert food and yard waste, recover recyclables, and incubate circular economy businesses. 

But most of the county’s 600,000 tons of annual municipal solid waste still ends up here.

Kent County is among a minority of counties in Michigan managing waste through a publicly operated system. The vast majority of landfills statewide — 49 of 60 — are privately owned and profit-driven, further reinforcing the incentive to bury. Waste Management owns and operates dozens of landfills across Michigan. Baas sees this as a structural barrier to meaningful change.

“We need public-private partnerships,” he said. “The investments that need to be made are long-term — that’s not something the private sector is going to do on its own.”

The challenge Baas faces isn’t just operational — it’s systemic. As Michigan works to meet its climate goals, one of the most potent sources of greenhouse gas emissions is hiding in plain sight: landfills.

When food, yard waste, and other organic materials are buried, they decompose without oxygen and produce methane — a greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Though less visible than smokestacks or tailpipes, landfills are among the state’s largest sources of methane emissions, trailing only the fossil fuel sector.

Michigan recently overhauled its solid waste law, in part to address methane leaks. But even with new rules on the books, economic incentives still favor the cheapest option: burying waste. 

Baas sees this as a core flaw in how Michigan manages its garbage — and a missed opportunity. In Kent County, he’s built an integrated system that prioritizes material recovery, energy generation, and composting over landfilling.

However, those systems are more expensive upfront and require initial and ongoing investment, which means aligning public infrastructure, private capital and long-term planning in ways Michigan’s current system doesn’t support.

At the heart of the issue is a tension between innovation and inertia — between new solutions and a regulatory and economic system still structured around cheap disposal. Michigan has the opportunity to lead on waste recovery, Baas argues, but doing so will require more than technical upgrades. It will demand a fundamental rethinking of how the state handles waste — and who bears the burden.

A new regulatory push

Michigan overhauled its solid waste law in 2022, in part to address methane leaks. The updated Part 115 requires all landfills — regardless of age or size — to self-monitor methane emissions and fix leaks through patching or installing gas collection systems if they exceed thresholds. New technologies, including satellite mapping and drones, offer more precise ways to detect emissions than traditional walkover surveys — but adoption remains slow.

Sniffer Robotics, an Ann Arbor-based company, developed the only EPA-approved drone for landfill methane detection. Its technology, already in use at Arbor Hills Landfill, can locate leaks faster and more accurately than older methods. Yet despite promising results, cost barriers and procurement hurdles have limited uptake across the state.

Michigan’s new rules also impose faster compliance timelines: sites must correct surface emissions within 90 days or begin designing a full gas collection system. Currently, Michigan landfills use a mix of active and passive gas systems — active systems vacuum methane to flares or energy generators. In contrast, passive systems may vent it directly into the air. Sites without active collection may eventually be forced to upgrade.

Tim Unseld, a solid waste engineer with the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), said two landfills without gas systems have already detected surface emissions and made repairs. But those fixes may not last. “Once enough landfill gas is generated, it will follow the path of least resistance to escape,” he said. Ongoing repairs can become costly — pushing operators toward installing full recovery systems, particularly if they can sell the captured methane as energy.

Environmental advocates argue the reforms don’t go far enough. “We’re the sixth-largest producer of landfill methane emissions, even though we’re only the 10th or 11th most populous state,” said Mike Garfield, executive director of the Ecology Center. “The basic reason is simple: We’ve made it too easy and too cheap to landfill waste.”

Garfield wants the state to adopt enforceable best practices across the board — including tighter flare controls, real-time monitoring, and mandatory adoption of tools like Sniffer’s — and points to the 2022 Arbor Hills consent judgment as a model.

Arbor Hills, owned by GFL Environmental, is the largest landfill in the state in terms of the amount of waste in place, according to EPA. It has faced years of complaints and violations tied to odor, gas migration, and leachate issues. So far, however, EGLE has not moved to apply those stricter terms statewide.

“The Part 115 amendments of 2023 include what EGLE considers best practices,” said agency spokesperson Josef Greenberg, adding that the state’s current focus is on implementation.

The economics of food waste disposal

Food waste is the largest single component of Michigan’s municipal waste stream by weight. Yet efforts to keep it out of landfills face a steep uphill climb — in large part because the system is built to reward the opposite.

Disposal fees are typically based on weight, creating a strong financial incentive for landfills owners to accept heavier materials like food waste. “This is really carbon-rich material — it generates methane, and they can use that methane to drive biogas-based processes,” Desirée Plata, an environmental engineer at MIT.

It’s a perverse incentive, she noted, especially as Michigan aims to reduce methane emissions. Instead of rewarding diversion, the current system reinforces disposal. “We’re paying for disposal by the ton, not by environmental outcome,” she said. According to EPA data, 35 out of 60 landfills in Michigan — nearly 60% — have landfill gas-to-energy projects. 

That tension sits at the heart of Baas’s frustration. He’s spent years trying to reorient the local waste system around recovery. “I’ve been told I’m an oddity in the waste industry,” Baas said. “Most people don’t see the system this way.”

Waste recovery adds expense and faces adoption challenges, said Debora Johnston with Waste Management. “Capturing landfill gas generates revenue to help operators keep disposal costs down, helps protect our environment, and creates a renewable energy source for our local community,” she said.

“But separating out organics like food waste is expensive.” Indeed, the estimated cost for Kent County to meet the needs of a community of 640,000 to process 400,000 tons of mixed waste would exceed $400 million.

Plata said one of the most effective actions municipalities can take today is to fund composting. “Every municipality on the planet should be funding compost programs,” she said. “It’s one of the easiest things we can do to fight climate change — and it works.”

But Johnston points out the challenge of getting people to change their ways.

“Most communities are finding participation in recycling programs to have plateaued,” Johnston said. “And new organics collection and drop-off sites face many of the same challenges.”

That’s why Baas sees single-stream processing — separating out organics like food waste and recoverable items like recyclables and metals after pickup — as the path forward.

Despite setbacks, including the withdrawal of a private-sector partner, Kent County is moving forward with its Sustainable Business Park — a proposed 250-acre campus on county-owned farmland next to the nearly full South Kent Landfill.

The county has made a deliberate decision not to site a new landfill there and instead repurpose the land for recovery infrastructure that could process food and yard waste — which has been banned from landfills in Michigan since 1993.

“We’re past the point of building another landfill,” Baas said. “We’re trying to do something different.” Still, he acknowledges the economics won’t shift without public investment and new rules. 

“We’ve determined that the highest, best use for these organics was mission critical,” he said. “But unless you change policy and infrastructure to make it go somewhere else, food waste will keep going to landfills — the lowest hanging fruit economically.”


Nina Misuraca Ignaczak wrote this article for Planet Detroit.


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