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Hi:

I ran out of time in my 2 minutes at the microphone on July 19th
to express the other great concern of the Sierra Club National
Zero Waste Committee, the possible inclusion of Waste-to-Energy
(WtE) and landfill gas to energy (LFGTE) into California's
Renewable Energy Standards (RES).  I couldn't find a description
of what qualifies, or doesn't, in the draft scoping plan. 

Twelve states alredy exclude WtE from their RES and we would like
to see California join this list of leadership states.  WtE is in
direct competition with composting and recycling. And it is by far
more beneficial to society to recover materials for reuse,
recycling and composting than to use them to create energy.

The "Stop Trashing the Climate" study discussing this issue in
great detail  wwww.stoptrashingtheclimate.org has the full
report.

As for LFGTE, the Sierra Club is working on new policy so I can't
state that excluding LFGTE is Club policy.  But as I said in my
spoken comments, if there is any chance that the systems needed to
create high enough concentrations of methane, have additional and
adverse problem of increasing the release of fugitve methane and
accompanied VOCs with HAPS, then until proven one way or another,
the inclusion of LFGTE in the RES could be very detrimental to
people living near and downwind of landfills and to curbing
greenhouse gas emissions.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Thank you.

Ann Schneider
Chair, National Zero Waste Committee
Sierra Club