Is composting good for greenhouse gas emissions?

Question

My understanding of composting is that the vegetable matter decomposes to many of its base elements and releases some gases in the process. I assume that a lot of this is likely to be methane.
If methane is a large byproduct of composting, then it is also a large contributor to global warming.
What is the greenhouse gas cost of the alternatives to composting. i.e. having a dump truck haul the waste to a landfill and bury it where it may decompose slowly over many years, or possibly not at all.

Answer 1

All organic matter in the space of time decompose ,The process can be slow, a dead tree in the forest or faster like a compost pile that has faster decomposing material, like grass, leaves,vegetables,and the like. Dried material of a combustible nature when burned and produce Co2.
The things we as a civilian population do to create the ozone depletion problem are very little compared to the big power, and smelter Companies.
The compost that we make is mostly used to enrich our variety of gardens, to grow vegetables and greenery which use Co2 and produce oxygen. We,people of the earth should concentrate on renewable energy sources, but some problems can never be erased.

Answer 2

OK, so landfill: trucks use gas to haul it off. The stuff gets dumped into a pile of nasty toxins. Then the dump decomposes and produces methane.

There would be no offset even if the dump collected its own methane.

You could freeze the compost or incinerate it at a garbage incinerator (that produces energy). But still....

Perhaps the best thing would be to throw it all into an aneorbic digester, pull out the methane, put the methane into fuel cells (that would convert the methane) and use the waste from the digester as compost, thus saving all the good soil nutrients. Yes. Take it to your local sewage treatment plant!

Just some thoughts....

Answer 3

Greenhouse gases comprise any warmth soaking up/trapping gasoline in the ambience. It incorporates water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Human activiity has no result on water vapor yet we are emitting extremely a lot of greenhouse gasoline emissions by using the burning of fossil fuels for potential. the tiers of CO2 in the ambience have not been as intense as they are literally for the previous 650,000 years (as a ways back as scientists can list by using reading the air bubbles trapped in the ice sheets). 80 2% of those human led to greenhouse gasoline emissions is CO2. Methane makes up 9% and Nitrous Oxide makes up 5%. Scientists challenge that we want to cut back our greenhouse gasoline emissions by using 2% each 365 days for the subsequent 40 years with the intention to circumvent the most intense results of international warming.

Answer 4

Think along these lines...most of the earths oxygen comes from the oceans not trees.Its a natural byproduct which nobody or anything can do about.Its still going into the atmosphere and has a important part as a stratospheric layer.

Answer 5

I have worked around methane most of my life. What makes u think that it propagates global warming and how. Methane is a very light gas and will rise very high and I think at those high altitude the gas is oxidized and then as CO2 it comes back to the ground and the plants process it by photosynthesis to oxygen. U cant measure it to prove it but if we had a huge amount in the upper atmosphere it should of exploded when N.A.S.A launched through it. No explosion yet.