We are walking along Short Mountain’s perimeter road, at the far end of the landfill from the open pit. Above us rise a pair of pyramids wrapped in black plastic, 100-foot-high garbage ziggurats, their hearts a potpourri of lawn furniture, kitchen utensils and shower curtains. These are phases one and two of Short Mountain, the latter closed only since November. Like giant black pincushions, each of the mountains is perforated every 75 feet by one of the wells eight-inch-diameter PVC tubes that are sunk up to 100 feet into the trash pile. The wells are linked by a mile-long system of plastic tubing to the power plant, where the methane that naturally burbles up from the decomposing garbage is filtered, cooled and then fed directly into the thrumming yellow engines.

Beside us is the main gas pipeline, an 18-inch diameter black plastic tube that snakes along the road like a giant boa constrictor digesting an unfortunate villager. Because the black plastic expands and contracts with temperature fluctuations, the 3,000-foot long pipeline can gain and loose hundreds of feet in length over the course of a day. “It does its own thing,” says Doug, continuing to fiddle with the electronic device. “Sometimes you come out here in the summer and you can actually hear the pipe scraping across the road as it lengthens.”

We stop at a junction where tubing from one of the wells meets the pipeline, a valve marked C8 with white paint and topped by a red-handled knob. Doug kneels down to attach the Gem 2000 to couplings on the valve casing via two clear plastic tubes. He presses a button and the machine makes a small whirring noise, vacuuming in a gas sample for analysis. After about a minute, the numbers flickering on the screen stabilize. The reading: 50.8 percent methane, 33.4 percent carbon dioxide, four percent oxygen, and a balance of 11 percent (mainly nitrogen).

The methane is what he’s after. Methane is a dense, flammable gas, the main ingredient in so-called natural gas burned by stoves and hot water heaters in millions of American homes. Methane is formed by anaerobic decomposition, primarily in swamps, but also in trash heaps—the byproduct of billions of bacteria digesting organic matter like leather shoes, paper cups and chicken bones. In addition to being flammable, methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and the EPA is so concerned with its effect on global warming that each landfill with over a million cubic feet of garbage (Short Mountain is an average- sized landfill at nearly 6 million cubic feet) is required to capture its methane and burn it. The combustion converts methane to the far more benign carbon dioxide, 21 times less potent as a greenhouse gas. If that combustion is used to fire generators as at Short Mountain, then there is a tidy double ecological net of greenhouse reduction and alternative energy production. Unfortunately, only 16 percent of the nation’s 2,300 landfills harness that mandated combustion for energy—at the remainder, the potential electricity literally goes up in smoke.