Integrated assessment of methane and PFAS atmospheric emissions from municipal solid waste landfills
ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5048-3672
Year
2026
Season
Spring
Paper Type
Master's Thesis
College
College of Computing, Engineering & Construction
Degree Name
Master of Science in Civil Engineering (MSCE)
Department
Engineering
NACO controlled Corporate Body
University of North Florida. School of Engineering
Committee Chairperson
Dr. Florentino De La Cruz
Second Advisor
Dr. Andres Leiva Araos
Rights Statement
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Third Advisor
Dr. Jiannan (Nick) Chen
Abstract
Estimates of annual methane emissions from landfills rely primarily on first-order decay (FOD) models; however, agreement between model-based estimates and field- derived annual emissions across multiple sites has not been established. The objective of this study was to compare annual CH4 emissions from seven model implementations based on EPA GHGRP, IPCC, CARB, and Dutch Afvalzorg protocols with annual emissions derived from satellite observations, surface emissions monitoring (SEM), and tracer correlation (TC). Direct measurement estimates varied by method and site, but the overlapping landfill-year comparisons did not show a statistically significant difference in this data set. Across the five LF07 overlaps, SEM was on average 54.0% higher than Satellite, with a median difference of 65.7%. For the two 2025 TC-Satellite overlaps, TC was 9.6% lower at LF07 and 100.4% higher at LF08. When pooled direct measurement estimates were compared with the seven FOD model implementations, agreement was weak (R2 < 0.08). Across the 623 paired model-measurement comparisons, the median model-to-measurement ratio was 0.90, 52.6% of modeled values were lower than the measured values, and only 27.0% were within a factor of two. Sensitivity analysis showed that k was the dominant parameter in five of the seven implementations, whereas L0 was dominant in the two IPCC implementations. Con- straining the highest-ranked parameters reduced the weighted mean distance of the measurement-to-model ratio from 1.137 to 1.021, corresponding to a 10.2% improve- ment. The improvement ranged from 2.4% for IPCC Bulk to 16.0% for IPCC Com- position, showing that parameter selection explains part of the model-measurement discrepancy but does not eliminate it. Overall, the tested implementations did not reproduce measured annual landfill CH4 emissions consistently, and the results show the importance of direct measurement for evaluating and improving inventory-based landfill methane estimates.
Suggested Citation
Ando, Meshach, "Integrated assessment of methane and PFAS atmospheric emissions from municipal solid waste landfills" (2026). UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 1428.
https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/1428
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