Impact of landfill caps on leachate emissions – an Austrian case study

This is from "Science for Environment Policy - DG Environment News Alert Service" issue 251.

"Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills, which consist of everyday consumer items, are potential long-term sources of emissions that could threaten the environment and human health if they are not managed carefully after closure. New research has presented a methodology to estimate future emission levels for closed MSW landfills and the impact of different aftercare strategies.

Globally, landfilling is the main method for disposing of solid waste. Highly industrialised countries, such as the US, the UK and Finland, extensively depend on landfilling their waste without any pre-treatment. As MSW landfills are possibly long-term sources of emissions, these sites need to be managed beyond closure.

According to the EU Landfill Directive1, which took effect in 1999, landfill operators have to continue managing sites after closure as long as the authority considers the landfill not likely to present a hazard to the environment any more.
The researchers used an Austrian MSW landfill in Breitenau as a case study to evaluate emission levels from the site and to demonstrate the long-term environmental effects of installing a final cover to prevent emissions. This site was closed in 1989 and was capped with layers of gravel (0.2 metres) and sandy silt (0.9 metres). The temporary cap was removed after 20 years (in 2009) and a composite lining system was installed as the final cover. The study focused on one landfill compartment, which contained around 35,000 tons of MSW.

Leachate emissions decrease very slowly and may have environmental impacts for centuries to come. The approach to evaluate potential future emissions was based on a comprehensive assessment of the state of the landfill and included analysis of monitoring data, investigations of landfilled waste, and an evaluation of containment systems and site-specific factors, such as climate. Future emission levels were modelled and site-specific predictions of leachate emissions were presented.

The results suggest that leachate concentrations increased considerably at the site when there was a change in the water flow pattern of the waste during final cover construction. Specifically, the concentrations of leachate pollutants chloride and ammonia-nitrogen increased from 200 to 800 milligrams per litre (mg/l) and 140 to about 500 mg/l, respectively. It is found that a period of intensive flushing after the change of the water flow pattern and before the final cover installation would have reduced the amount of leachable substances within the landfill and substance concentrations in the leachate would decrease to 11 mg/l of chloride and 79 mg/l of ammonia-nitrogen within 50 years.

A decline in water infiltration due to the installation of an impermeable top cover may lead to high substance concentrations in the leachate for centuries (above 400 mg of chloride per litre and 200 mg ammonia-nitrogen per litre), but with low associated annual emission loads (below 12 kg of chloride and 9 kg of ammonia-nitrogen per year). However, a gradual decrease in the cover’s performance may be expected without cover maintenance and would be associated with higher emission loads of a maximum of 50 kg of chloride and 30 kg of ammonia–nitrogen.
The methodology can be applied to other closed landfill sites to illustrate the effect of different aftercare strategies on the landfill pollution hazard. The researchers caution that emission models should be treated as tools to demonstrate the effect of different landfill conditions and not as deterministic forecasts of the future.

1. See: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:1999:182:0001:0019:EN:PDF

Source: David Laner, D., Fellner, J. & Brunner, P.H. (2011) Future landfill emissions and the effect of final cover installation – A case study. Waste Management. 31 (7):1522-1531

Contact: d.laner@iwa.tuwien.ac.at "

Waste Management 2030+

This is an article I prepared for the magazine Waste Management World. It is based on my key-note lecture at ISWA´s conference in Lisbon, October 2009.

The purpose of the article is to outline the major trends and challenges that will shape the future of waste management for the next few decades. Although in our complex and unpredictable world ‘prediction is very difficult, especially about the future’ (Niels Bohr), there are certain trends and facts that more or less create the ‘bigger picture’ in which the waste management industry will evolve. Interestingly, discussion of these trends has not up till now directly linked them with waste management – at least not according to the author’s knowledge.


Putting these trends together and considering the consequences they will have for waste management, it is clear that new challenges are emerging, and the current situation must be seen in a different way. Our waste management systems and our market conditions, even at their best, are incapable of handling the growing amounts of waste globally. So unless a new paradigm of global cooperation and governance is adopted, a tsunami of uncontrolled dumpsites will be the prevailing waste management method, especially in Asia.

The whole article can be found at:

http://www.waste-management-world.com/index/display/article-display/8267238380/articles/waste-management-world/volume-11/issue-2/features/waste-management_2030.html

I hope you will enjoy it

Sustainable landfill concepts from a practicioner's view

This is paper written by Haris kamariotakis and me.

It was presented and discussed at ISWA Master Class for sustainable landfills, October 2009 in Lisbon. The Master Class was organized by ISWA Working Group on Sanitary Landfills, which is chaired by ny good friend Derek Greedy.

I think its view was really appreciated by the participants.

I hope you will enjoy it too.

You can find it at http://www.scribd.com/doc/52390003/Sustainable-Landfill-Concept

Risk assessment as an engineering tool for landfills

Risk assessment has been widely used as a tool for the development of waste management facilities. At the strategic level, risk assessment is used to inform decision makers about the planning process. As an engineering tool, risk assessment is used to optimize the mitigation measures required to prevent, control or minimize the risks to the environment from the site. The use of risk assessment techniques in landfill design and in uncontrolled dumps remediation / rehabilitation has provided remarkable results in terms of cost savings and environmental protection. This paper aims to present risk assessment applications in landfilling and thus to outline the key role of risk based engineering.

This is a publication made at WIT Waste Management 2002 Conference in Cadith and can be found at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4911701/Risk-assessment-as-an-engineering-tool-for-landfills

LANDFILL SITING USING GIS AND FUZZY LOGIC

Thsi paper has been published at Sardinia 2001 conference. The whole paper can be found at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3213721/LANDFILL-SITING-USING-GIS-AND-FUZZY-LOGIC

Summary: The construction of landfills is a no alternative option, since a landfill is always necessary independently of the specific waste management system that will be developed. The criteria that must be met to allocate a landfill are various and in many circumstances conflicting. For that reason the result is not univocal, it depends on the criteria and the methodology used together with its restrictions. The suggested methodology utilizes GIS technology for the input, the management and the visualization of the geographic data while fuzzy logic is used for the analysis of the data and the evaluation of the final results. The basic elements of the fuzzy logic methodology as well as its potential in the specific problem are described. A case study took place in one Governorate in Egypt, one of the twenty-seven country administrative units. The results drawn up by fuzzy logic are compared with that of the classical Boolean approach of data analysis.

Uncontrolled landfill investigation: a case study in Athens

This is a paper published in Waste Research and Management 1999, 17, 159-164 . The whole paper can be found at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3213642/Uncontrolled-landfill-investigation-a-case-study-in-Athens

Uncontrolled landfills comprise one of the most important topics as regards to Solid Waste Management (SWM) in Greece. The enviromental impacts of these landfills are closely related to some particular characteristics, namely the composition and quantity of the disposed solid wastes and the conditions that control the physicochemical processes inside the waste volume, which in fact determine the rehabilitation plan . The objective of this paper is to present a method to gain all these crucial data. The definition of the necessary information in order to have a sufficient knowledge about the landfill processes and the choice of the appropriate overall measurements (biogas, geophysical methods) are the key factors to transced the problem of unconformity and the absence of data, without wasting time and money.

Developing the strategy for biodegradable waste management in Greece

This is a paper published in 2004 in the conference "Biodegradable and Residual Waste Management 2004", CRe, Harrogate, 2004". The whole paper can be found at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3213501/Developing-the-strategy-for-biodegradable-waste-management-in-Greece

Summary: The Council Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste, places targets on Member States to reduce the quantities of biodegradable municipal waste (BMW) going on landfill. Greece taking advantage of the four-year extension allowed for those countries landfilling more than 80% of their waste in the year 1996, is formulating its strategy by placing targets for the years 2010, 2013 and 2020. The aim of this paper, is to present the approach for the formulation of the Greek Strategy, given a wide array of economic, cultural and geographic constraints coupled with a lack of reliable data-series on waste production.

LANDFILL DESIGN USING LIMITED FINANCIAL RESOURCES

This is a paper published in Sardinia 2001 conference. You can find the whole article in

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3213253/LANDFILL-DESIGN-USING-LIMITED-FINANCIAL-RESOURCES

Summary: The objective of this paper is to contribute in finding an effective decision – making tool for landfill design in developing countries. The paper is based on the experience gained from the implementation of the project «Action plan for the site location and the development of design, operation and environmental impact assessment methods of solid waste sanitary landfills in Egypt governorates» which is granted by EU LIFE 3rd Countries program. Taking into account a risk based approach, a simplified but effective landfill design tool is proposed. It is believed that such a tool can provide a good basis for the conceptual landfill design within a framework of limited financial resources that characterize developing countries.