Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has announced the successful auction of R36-million in carbon credits, generated by reducing gas emissions at city landfill sites via waste-to-energy initiatives.

The funds will be ring-fenced for urban waste management projects aimed at reducing pollution and improving environmental health within the city.

The Cape Town Council recently resolved to auction the carbon credits to take advantage of what it called “attractive rates”, owing to the demand for credits on the South African market currently exceeding supply by around 3.4 times.

These carbon credits were earned for each ton of greenhouse gas (GHG) that was destroyed through city projects that had been registered with the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme.

The CDM scheme is a carbon-offset scheme allowing countries to fund GHG-emission-reducing projects in other countries, and to claim the saved emissions as part of their own efforts to meet international emission targets.

Cape Town has installed landfill gas-infrastructure at the Bellville, Coastal Park and Vissershok landfill sites to reduce methane emissions, known to have a global warming potential about 25 times greater than CO2.

“We welcome this initial return of R36-million from our first carbon credit auction,” says Hill-Lewis.

“We are just getting started in scaling up our waste-to-energy initiatives at our landfill sites. These are win-win projects which reduce emissions, generate electricity, and bring in revenue from carbon credit sales for more infrastructure investment.”

“We expect our landfill waste-to-energy initiatives to pay for themselves in time between the sale of carbon credits and a reduction in bulk electricity purchases from Eskom,” adds Urban Waste Management MMC Grant Twigg.

“To convert landfill gas into electricity, perforated pipes, or wells, have been dug into landfill sites to extract methane gas. The gas is then channelled as fuel to produce electricity to power our operations at landfill sites.”

Around 40% of Cape Town's R120-billion, ten-year infrastructure pipeline is aimed at upping the city's climate change resilience, notes Hill-Lewis.

“This includes major water and sanitation investments, as well as waste management improvements.”