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UNH uses garbage to go green

Print | Comments () Posted by Beth Daley June 10, 2009 06:48 AM

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Colleges are going green all over New England by installing solar arrays to illuminate campus paths to starting grassroot groups to pressure politicians to pass carbon limiting laws. There is even an effort to make students take shorter showers to save on heating hot water.

But few are doing as much as the University of New Hampshire. The five million square foot campus is now getting up to 85 percent of its electricity and heat from a nearby landfill’s methane gas. It is the first university in the country to use landfill gas as its main fuel source.

Called Ecoline, the project gets its methane from a landfill at Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise in Rochester. Methane is a natural by-product of decaying waste and is collected via 300 extraction wells and miles of collection pipes.

The University of New Hampshire’s EcoLine™ is a landfill gas-to-energy project that will use purified methane gas from a Waste Management landfill as the campus’s main energy source. (Mike Ross/UNH)

After the gas is purified and compressed, it travels through a 12.7 mile pipeline to UNH’s power plant where it is replacing commercial natural gas.

The project cost $49 million but some of that will be returned by selling excess power back into the region’s electricity grid and selling renewable energy certificates to other companies.

UNH has pledged to lower its greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2080.