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Pangea president Jennifer Fernan Campos said the Payatas energy project was set up to take advantage of the UN scheme, with the first kilowatts generated in 2008.
“We are also very gratified to be helping the environment and the community. In our own little way we are mitigating greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.
Thousands of renewable energy projects in developing countries have been registered under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism since it began in 2005, including wind farms, solar stations and hydropower dams.
There have also been many waste-to-energy projects, with four others in the Philippines starting up after the pioneering Pangea operation, according to industry websitewww.cdmpipeline.org.
However the market price for each ton of greenhouse gas that companies save started dropping sharply in 2010, partly because of the economic meltdown in Europe which was the biggest source of revenues.
“Our rate is a floating one so when the market collapsed, we suffered,” Fernan Campos said, explaining they made the mistake of not locking in a higher price when they had the chance.
Industry experts have warned the carbon trading scheme is in danger because of the collapse in prices, and many clean-energy projects face an uncertain future.
However Fernan Campos said the Payatas project had become commercially viable without the UN-channelled money.
She said Pangea this month expanded capacity from 200 kilowatts to one megawatt, and began selling directly onto Manila’s electricity grid.
Previously the electricity generated at Payatas had just been used to power operations at the landfill and for the nearby slum communities via the ironing project and neighbourhood street lights.
The amount of greenhouse gases that are now being saved at Payatas is the equivalent to taking 18,000 cars off Manila’s roads, according to Fernan Campos.
She said the project had a host of other environmental benefits, including less direct air pollution for people living close by. The extracted methane gas could also no longer contaminate the water system.
Nevertheless, Greenpeace and some other environment groups oppose waste-to-energy projects, arguing their green credentials are often exaggerated and that they create a financial incentive for more rubbish to be dumped.
“The only way to address the issue of methane generation from waste is to stop the rubbish going to the landfill in the first place,” Greenpeace Philippines programme manager Beau Baconguis said.
“Having such projects in place encourages the generation of waste, rather than eliminating it, because you need waste to run the facility.”
Baconguis said there was no vision from the Philippine government to reduce waste, and that Manila’s roughly 12 million residents were producing between 6,000 and 8,000 tons of rubbish every day.
However Fernan Campos insisted Pangea was not lobbying for, or encouraging, more waste to be dumped at Payatas.
She said the local government had implemented recycling and other waste-reduction policies in recent years that had seen the amount of rubbish going into the landfill drop from 1,800 tons a day to 1,200.
“We are just clearing whatever is there, and helping the environment at the same time,” she said.