Philippine municipal waste is about half organic: food, garden waste, paper. In a landfill it decomposes without oxygen and produces a gas of roughly 50 to 55% methane and the balance carbon dioxide, for two or three decades after the waste is placed. The Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 requires a sanitary landfill to collect and control that gas. The operator's choice is between a flare, which destroys the methane and earns nothing, and an engine, which does the same and sells the power.
Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.
How much gas
It depends on the organic fraction, the moisture and the age of the waste, and a Philippine landfill, wet and organic, produces more per tonne and sooner than a European one. The usual method is to model the gas curve from the tonnage records and then to confirm it with a pumping test on a few wells. A landfill of a few million tonnes in place typically supports engine capacity in the low megawatts, for a period that the waste intake keeps extending.
What the plant is
Vertical wells drilled into the waste, a collection network of pipes under a slight vacuum, a blower, a treatment stage that removes moisture and the siloxanes that damage engines, and a gas engine with a generator. A flare stands beside it for the hours the engine is down. The technology is standard and has run at hundreds of sites for thirty years.
Why it matters beyond the power
Methane is a greenhouse gas of about 28 times the effect of carbon dioxide over a century, and an uncontrolled landfill is one of the largest single sources a city has. Capturing it is the cheapest emission reduction most local governments can make, and it is the one that can be measured by the cubic metre. The carbon value of the reduction, where it can be sold, is often larger than the electricity revenue.
The private landfill
The Philippines has private sanitary landfills serving several cities each, and they hold the tonnage, the records and the obligation to control the gas. For those operators the engine is the natural project, and the front-end sorting that feeds a refuse-derived fuel line is the second.
The private landfills page sets out both.
We take a waste-to-energy plant from the feasibility study through delivery and into operation. Tell us about the site and the waste.
The next step
If you have organic waste or a boiler and want to know what it is actually worth, tell us what the site produces and what it costs you today. An engineer replies with the first step.
Tell us about your site →