Bill Gates’ $29B Stake in Landfill Company Tied to Major Methane Emissions

Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today! This story was originally published by ProPublica . In November 2015, world leaders descended on Paris to negotiate a historic agreement to limit global warming. But on the summit’s opening day, attention turned to a private citizen slouched awkwardly in a chair on stage: Bill Gates. Gates, with his characteristic flop of sandy hair, grinned impishly as President Barack Obama called him a “visionary” and a “driving force” behind a pair of pledges that both saw as key to the larger agreement.

First the world’s largest economies would double their spending on research into clean-energy technologies. Then investors like Gates would back the startups that emerged. The Microsoft cofounder had already enlisted two dozen other billionaires to join the effort. For Gates, who’d become increasingly consumed by this unprecedented threat to human well-being, the moment marked his arrival as a leading figure in the fight against climate change.

“If we back over 50 different breakthrough approaches, we know that several of those will give us the solution that we need,” Gates said during his own speech. He would invest at least $2 billion of his own money in companies developing geothermal wells, new kinds of nuclear reactors and machines that pull carbon from the air , to name just a few. With much less fanfare, however, Gates has put more than double that amount into a very dirty, old-school industry.

At the time of the Paris summit, he was already the dominant shareholder of America’s No. 2 landfill operator, Republic Services. He has since increased his stake to 38% of the company, a position worth $29 billion. Related Story News | Environment & Health Landfills Belch Climate-Warming Methane. Even the EPA Doesn’t Know How Much. Landfills are a major source of greenhouse gas, but emissions are rarely measured at the source. By Mike Ludwig , T ruthout December 11, 2021 While fossil fuels get most of the attention, scientists increasingly see landfills as a crucial climate issue.

They’re responsible for as much as a fifth of the country’s emissions of methane , a highly potent greenhouse gas, studies show. Republic alone generates as much climate pollution as 3 million gasoline-burning cars each year, according to its own reports. One might imagine that a landfill operator with Gates as its largest shareholder — and with three people closely linked to Gates on its board — would lead the way in tackling those emissions.

Even after seemingly softening his stance on global warming in a controversial blog post last year, Gates remains one of the world’s most prominent voices on the issue. As he did in his bestselling 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” he continues to advocate for cutting emissions , and he has called on his fellow business leaders to do their part. Gates, though, has failed to make Republic live up to his own climate principles, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Federal inspectors have repeatedly found methane escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. The company has refrained from adopting the ambitious emissions-reduction goal embraced by its main competitor. Republic has even lobbied against policies that could make the wider industry cleaner, including by keeping organic waste out of landfills in the first place. “It seems very likely that Bill Gates has the power to influence Republic’s behavior to make it more climate-friendly, even if that costs the company profits,” said Ann Lipton, a legal scholar who studies corporate governance at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

As for whether he should, in her words, “put his money where his mouth is,” Lipton said, “you can leave it to the reader to make the moral judgment.” Gates’ Climate Awakening Gates didn’t respond to repeated requests to discuss his landfill investments, and ProPublica couldn’t find any public comments he’s made about them. But the bet has proven wildly lucrative. Since November 1999, when he emerged as the owner of 5% of Republic’s shares — “ It’s ‘Garbage In’ for Gates ,” the New York Post headline read — the company’s stock price has soared thirtyfold.

And Gates has personally received $2.6 billion in dividends, a ProPublica analysis of securities filings shows. In those early days, Gates hadn’t yet awakened to the threat of global warming. It was a different time. Microsoft Windows ran on more than 80% of personal computers. Gates was the world’s richest person, and his bespectacled face graced the cover of Time magazine twice that year . He was simultaneously criticized for what a federal judge determined to be Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and admired for establishing what was soon to become the world’s largest charitable foundation.

A rare clue to why Gates made his foray into landfills can be found in an interview he gave to Fortune that year. To fund his plan to give away virtually his entire fortune, he said he’d given his personal money manager, Michael Larson, a simple remit: Sell Microsoft shares, buy safe, boring assets. Republic’s then-chairman, billionaire Wayne Huizenga , had flown Larson by helicopter to his private golf course in Florida, according to the article.

It’s unclear if Huizenga pitched Republic there, but it fit the remit. America would always produce trash, ensuring a steady stream of revenue. After that initial investment, Larson progressively increased Gates’ stake in Republic over the years that followed. Larson would also acquire a small chunk of Republic’s main competitor, Waste Management — which Huizenga also once led — on behalf of the Gates Foundation. It was only in 2006, when he asked two climate scientists to educate him, that Gates started to grasp the potentially “catastrophic” effects of greenhouse gases , he later wrote.

But he also saw that the poorest people in the world needed more energy to improve their lot. The solution, he concluded, was something climate activists often underplay: innovation that could make clean energy cheap enough to naturally displace fossil fuels. That was the idea behind Breakthrough Energy, the initiative he launched in Paris in 2015. Around the same time, methane began to emerge as a focus of climate action. The gas can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the near term, and it’s responsible for one-third of the global warming we experience today, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

But it also breaks down much more quickly, turning into CO2 and water vapor in about a decade — which means that cutting methane emissions now would reduce that warming within our lifetimes. This is especially urgent, scientists say, as the climate approaches tipping points that could doom rainforests, coral reefs and ice sheets. In speeches and interviews, Gates has sometimes warned about methane, but usually from agricultural sources (“ cow farts ,” in his words).

He has rarely mentioned landfills, even after Larson — who still runs Gates’ investment office, Cascade Asset Management — joined Republic’s board in 2009. Gates’ stake in the company, though, was a relatively small portion of his own net worth until fairly recently. And as Larson put it to Fortune , “I’ll call Bill about something I’m buying if he needs to know, but Bill might not have any idea what Cascade owns.” (Gates’ Republic holdings are publicly disclosed in securities filings.)

Elsewhere in Gatesworld, people started to home in on the climate threat posed by landfills. The root of the issue is that landfills store buried trash — and when organic waste decomposes underground, in the absence of oxygen, it generates methane. The Gates Foundation has funded research and advocacy aimed at solving that problem, and Breakthrough has backed at least two early-stage companies developing their own solutions. One, Windfall Bio, uses microbes to digest methane into fertilizer.

Its product was actually tested last year at a Republic landfill in California, where the pink liquid was sprinkled on the soil covering the top layer of trash. Windfall said the test worked, substantially reducing emissions, but the startup reportedly ceased operations after a Department of Energy grant was canceled . (Windfall didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.) On the surface, Republic has pursued a path consistent with Gates’ mission.

In 2019, it became the first U.S. landfill operator to sign up for the Science Based Targets Initiative, promising to cut its emissions by 35% by 2030. Not that this was charity. Republic’s “climate leadership” became part of its pitch for garbage-collection contracts in progressive cities and counties. The company also won placements on stock indexes for businesses that meet certain environmental, social and governance criteria , attracting sustainability-minded investors.

Still, a fundamental tension remained — one at the heart of Gates’ vision. As Republic’s then-CEO Donald Slager put it on a 2017 call with investors, “You can’t have sustainability without profitability.” A Not-So-Model Landfill Each day, Americans throw away melon rinds, salmon skins and half-eaten drumsticks, paper towels, cheese that was too funky and eggs a day past their sell-by date. They discard greasy pizza boxes with crusts still rattling around inside and unthinkable amounts of leftover Chinese takeout.

Not to mention the occasional dead pet. Most of that trash — 240 million tons a year, enough to bury Manhattan under 100 feet of refuse — is hauled to one of the country’s 1,400 active landfills, where hulking vehicles with spiked wheels crush it into thin layers. At the end of each day, bulldozers typically spread soil on top, and for almost everyone who produced that trash, it will forever remain out of sight and out of mind. People who live near landfills , though, describe smelling rotten cabbage, rotten eggs and rotten fish, as well as ammonia and skunk.

Or as a neighbor to one Republic landfill put it: “I started smelling this stench like burning diapers. … It was foul.” Some describe burning throats, burning eyes, headaches and nausea . And while methane itself has no scent, those odors indicate that the gas is being released , studies show. Still, modern landfills are an undeniable improvement over what came before. Open dumping and burning remained widespread until the 1970s. It was only in the ’90s that federal regulators started requiring operators to collect leachate (garbage juice, which can contaminate groundwater) and, at larger facilities, landfill gas (which is typically about half methane and half carbon dioxide but can also contain carcinogens like benzene).

Industry experts often compare landfills to living, breathing creatures. Underground trash inevitably shifts and settles, making it difficult to keep that gas from escaping . Managing such a beast is costly, which helps to explain why smaller operations have increasingly given way to corporations like Republic, which can turn a profit through economies of scale. Republic declined to make executives available for interviews or to allow ProPublica to visit a landfill.

But in May 2022 — around the same time Gates was lobbying for the passage of President Joe Biden’s historic climate bill — the company invited the Houston Chronicle to its local McCarty Road Landfill. Opened a half century earlier, the facility had passed through two corporate owners before being swallowed up by Republic, and now it was the site of a very Gatesian kind of project. On the day of the visit, gulls circled hungrily as workers in neon vests gave a tour of the gas-collection system .

Like at most other large landfills in the country, wells had been drilled deep into the trash below — five hundred of them in total. The top of each well sprouted from the grassy slopes in the form of a stubby black pipe fitted with a valve for adjusting the flow of underground gas. The workers also showed off large, bright blue, snail-shaped “blowers” — machines that suck that gas into a network of pipelines, then push it to the clanking, humming on-site plant that turns it into a salable product.

Most landfills that are required to collect gas simply burn it off . But they can