PITTSBURGH -- What if the stuff you throw away could warm your home, cook your food and, perhaps, power your car one day?

Channel 4 Action News reporter Shannon Perrine says going green is a hot trend, but landfills are a fact of life and will continue to be for generations.

The push is on to help the environment and make money with something that used to hurt the earth and cost money.

Every landfill creates landfill gas, and that gas can be dangerous.

"It can leak out of the landfill into adjacent buildings and build up, and if there's a spark -- for example, from a water heater -- then it can blow up," said Lester Lave, of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

The government requires landfill operators to spend money on mechanisms that trap the gas so it doesn't cause explosions, but those companies release most of it into the air.

That's not good, either, in a city like Pittsburgh, Lave said.

"It then becomes reactive hydrocarbons that can then cause ozone smog and cause lots of problems with that," he said. "When it's in the atmosphere, it also becomes a greenhouse warming gas. It's 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and it basically is a large contribution to global warming."

Scientists say there is something precious and profitable hiding inside the dangerous and dirty landfill gas: Methane that can be turned into a high-grade pipeline gas, like natural gas.

"When you take a look at the price of natural gas right now, it really makes sense to do it," Lave said.

David Wentworth, president of Renewable Solutions Group, is seizing opportunities to turn what used to cost landfill operators money into an eco-friendly profit maker.

"Our projects and a few other developers who do this actually reduce emissions at the landfill by 90 percent," he said.

Wentworth's company just broke ground on a plant in Georgia that will yield pipeline gas, which it can sell to utility companies.

"People should understand that the product that we produce is actually cleaner in terms of constituents in the gas and of more uniform heating quality than conventional natural gas, so, from a safety perspective, this is a more stable fuel than conventional natural gas," he said.

Waste Management operates five local landfills, all of which are producing landfill gas and selling it. They call it recycled methane. Nationwide, the company has 100 methane producing projects.

"We produce enough power to power the equivalent of one million homes. That's the equivalent of 14 million barrels of oil that we save each year," said Michael Rind, of Waste Management.

Companies that produce landfill gas for energy are also eligible for government subsidies.

Experts say there's enough garbage in this country's landfills to triple the current production capacity.

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