Household waste to landfill: carbon footprint per tonne landfilled
Live factor value
497.29 kgCO2e per tonne landfilled
Source: UK DESNZ greenhouse-gas conversion factors, 2026 (revision 2). Factor set desnz-2026-r2.
Sending a tonne of ordinary household residual waste to landfill carries the official footprint shown live below — roughly half a tonne of CO2e per tonne buried. The culprit is methane: organic material decomposing without oxygen releases a greenhouse gas dozens of times more potent than CO2, only partially captured by landfill gas systems.
The same tables price the alternatives, and the contrast is stark: energy-from-waste combustion and recycling routes carry only a few kilograms of CO2e per tonne under the DESNZ method. Diverting the organic fraction — food and garden waste — does most of the work, because it is the rotting fraction that makes the methane.
Worked example
A tonne of residual household waste landfilled: 1 × 497.29 = 497 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free event calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is landfill so much worse than incineration in these tables?
- Methane. Buried organic waste decomposes anaerobically into methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than the CO2 released by combustion — and gas capture at landfills is incomplete.