Essay on The Choosing Of A Landfill Site

Anywhere you look around the United States landfills can be found. If you are lucky enough to pass by one, the site is probably seen reaching capacity. Sometimes you might not even see them before your nose catches the putrid scent. These landfill sites sure are not popular but they are very much a necessity to our lives. Imagine what we would do with all the trash if we did not have somewhere to go with it? Unfortunately, landfill sites do have negative side effects on the environment. Three of the top concerns related to landfills are toxins released in the air coming from items such as electronic waste, liquid trash contaminating the land and waterways, and greenhouse gas emissions like methane. With the world on watch with heightened awareness

The slow release from the landfill entails a dilution in time, which is hazardous. Landfills are disposal sites for waste which cannot be reused, recycled and recovered. “Waste is typically burnt at factories, but the waste which cannot be reused is taken to landfills where it is dumped”, (Spokas and Bogner, 2006: 516). Waste is taken to landfills to prevent pest infections, odour and litter. Once the waste is dumped and the landfill is to its full capacity, trained engineers build a cap out of clay and other solid materials. This is then covered with soil and other materials so that the site can be used for other things in the future such as nature conservation and agricultures. This is repeated for all sites.” Accordingly landfills are the most common form of waste disposal. “Landfills, being relatively cheaper than other treatment/disposal alternatives, are used not only by developing but also by industrialized countries, such as US, Australia, UK and Finland (Laner et al., 2012, cited in Diamantis et al., 2013:

Most of our household waste is buried in landfills. An important factor in how landfills are built is how they contain waste and prevent waste from contaminating nearby soil and water sources. Leachate is a fluid that has passed through or emerged from the waste in a landfill, picking up a variety of suspended and dissolved materials along the way. In unlined landfills, the leachate continues to leach into the ground and may contaminate groundwater. Many old landfills used a simple clay liner for containing leachate. Newer landfills are required to meet federal and state requirements to prevent environmental contamination. These landfills have sophisticated liner systems often made of heavy-duty, high density polyethylene plastic, where leachate is collected at the bottom. The leachate is typically treated on-site or is pumped out and sent to a local wastewater treatment plant. Treated leachate can be disposed of in a number of ways e.g., discharged to surface waters or recirculated back into the

The revised criteria in Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) part 258 addresses seven major Critical Requirements of MSWLFs, which include location restrictions which ensure that landfills are built in suitable geological areas away

Leachate is a massive ongoing potential issue in landfill that could pollute both surface water and the ground water (Environmental Protection Authority 2013). There are two leachate storage dams, which are used for the collection of contaminated rainwater from the landfill shown in figure 1 in order to prevent the environment of the ecosystem of nearby waterways and make sure that the contaminated water does not leave the site. This Landfill site is monitoring in a way that satisfies all the

Bioreactor is a modern landfills introduced in solid waste management, thus this concept are not fully universally applied yet. The objective of this bioreactor landfills involving disposal solely of inert materials after universally applied. Therefore, it is likely that landfills will continue to receive a variety of materials with potential for environmental impact. As the leachable materials are land disposed, impenetrable barriers are provided and waste stabilization is enhanced and accelerated so as to occur within the life of these barriers (Lee & Jones- Lee, 1996). That is, the landfill must be designed and operated as a bioreactor. This bioreactor landfills is equipped with liners and leachate collection systems. It operated and controlled to rapidly accelerate the biological stabilization of the land filled waste. The crucial process in bioreactor landfills is leachate recirculation, which leachate is recycled back to the landfill, to create the environment favorable to rapid microbial decomposition of the biodegradable solid waste (Lee & Jones- Lee, 1996). Additional advantages of the bioreactor landfill include increased gas production rates over a shorter duration, improved leachate quality, and more rapid landfill settlement. Instead of that, bioreactor operations protect the environment and reduce long- time liability and associated monitoring costs (Reinhart & Townsend, 1997). The rapid treatment of the waste facilitates the operation of a bioreactor landfill

In order to understand how to build a solid waste facility you first must understand what solid waste is and how it impacts a community. Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is an array of materials discarded by households, businesses, industries, and agriculture. Solid waste is not always in a solid form and can be semi-solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes. Proper disposal of these solid waste materials include municipal and industrial landfills, industrial surface impoundments, and incinerators. Through many useful disposal options waste can be handled as a reusable energy source such as with an incinerator the waste can be turned into energy. Sewage sludge and agricultural waste being applied to land surfaces as fertilizers or soil conditioners can save on disposal and increase production in farming areas. Building a sustainable waste facility can be done and it can be sustainable if managed correctly with low waste having to be placed into a landfill area.

For a household trash landfill (called a municipal solid waste landfill), the ground is fixed first with mud and after that with a skin of adaptable plastic about half an inch (1 centimeter) thick. Over this, channels and pipes gather a fluid called leachate, which is the polluted liquid that streams out of the body of the landfill. Leachate is the liquid that drains or ‘leaches’ from a landfill. It varies widely in composition regarding the age of the landfill and the type of waste that it contains. It usually contains both dissolved and suspended material. Landfills are not made to destroy junk, just to cover it. That is because they contain tiny amounts of oxygen and dampness, which keeps junk from decomposing quickly. So landfills are deliberately filled, checked and kept up while they are active for up to 30 years after they are shut down. Various different things happen once you have brought your recycling into the plant or have it picked up from your home. First, the recycling is brought into the plant and arranged or prepared by laborers who sit close to a transport line where the materials move gradually by for the duration of the day. Laborers isolate out various sorts of plastic, glass, and metal, and place them into canisters or collection bins where they are then moved to an alternate region of the recycling plant to be cleaned or additionally prepared for their final destination.

In coastal cities, there is threat of sea water intrusion in groundwater aquifers in addition to above concerns. In near future, this situation will be further complicated with climate change effects of sea level rise, flooding and pollution (IPCC, AR4, WGIII, 2007). In other words, coastal cities are faced with resource depletion, increased energy consumption, water pollution, eutrophication

Leachate Collection systems optimize landfill systems and are designed as fail-safes for the storm-water drainage systems. Whenever water permeates through the landfill wells, it reacts with organic and inorganic contaminants and then becomes leachate. It is treated as sewage or wastewater before it is released [Freudenrich, 2005].

Landfilling with electricity recovery used in this study is a typical MSW landfill with surface and basic sealing, site operations including landfill gas treatment, sludge treatment, leachate treatment and deposition, and meeting European limits for emissions. The inventory data are taken from the GaBi database (GaBi, 2015). 28% of the landfill gas is assumed to be used for electricity production while 22% of it is assumed to be flared and the rest (50%) emitted to the environment. The energy and manufacturing processes of the sealing materials requirements for the site, are included within the system.

There are many different types of solid waste classified according to a variety of criteria, from source to potential hazard. The most basic classifications typically used in solid waste management are municipal solid waste (which includes most of the waste produced by regular and ongoing human activities, including many industrial and institutional waste by products) and non-municipal waste, which includes specific types of industrial waste and certain other non-classified and non-municipal waste products (IDEM, 2001; Sasikumar & Krishna, 2009). A reuse classification is also sometimes used to refer to any waste, regardless of the source, that can be used in the construction of landfills and does not otherwise need to be treated and disposed of in a manner similar to other types of solid waste (IDEM, 2001). Virtually all activities that take place on a significant scale produce some type of solid waste, as an examination of further classification of waste types clearly shows.

Suitability of various treatment methods depends on physical and chemical characteristics of waste (Fig.1). The method of treatment is decided based on moisture content, organic matter and total solids.

1.1 BACKGROUND .................................................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 THE OPERATIONAL LEGAL AND REGULATORY FRAMEWORK OF THE STRATEGY ............................................ 2 1.2.1 Waste management Regulations.............................................................................................................. 2 1.2.2 Hazardous Waste Management Regulations

Waste disposal is a huge concern for our planet earth. Seven billion people live on earth and every single one of us creates waste. A lot of people think that their responsibility is over once the garbage is in the garbage bin and the garbage workers take it away, but that is not true. There is so much more to the process of waste disposal.