1.

0 Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Pollution occurs when a product added to our natural environment adversely affects
nature’s ability to dispose it. There are many types of pollution such as air pollution, soil
pollution, water pollution, nuclear pollution and oil pollution. A pollutant is something which
adversely interferes with health, comfort, property or environment of the people. Generally, most
pollutants are introduced in the environment as sewage, waste, accidental discharge and as
compounds used to protect plants and animals (Misra & Mani 1991).

Open dumps are the oldest and the most common way of disposing of solid wastes, and
although in recent years thousands have been closed, many are still being used. In many cases,
they are located wherever land is available, without regard to safety, health hazard and aesthetic
degradation. The waste is often piled as high as equipment allows. In some instances, the refuse
was ignited and allowed to burn. In others, the refuse was periodically leveled and compacted.
As a general rule, open dumps tend to create a nuisance by being unsightly, breeding pests,
creating a health hazard, polluting the air and sometimes polluting groundwater and surface
water.
Landfill is an engineered waste disposal site facility with specific pollution control
technologies designed to minimize potential impacts. Landfills are usually either placed above
ground or contained within quarries and pits Landfills are sources of groundwater and soil
pollution due to the production of leachate and its migration through refuse (Chistensen &
Stegmann 1992).
Leachate pollution is the result of a mass transfer process. Waste entering landfill
undergoes biological, chemical and physical transformations which are controlled, among other
influencing factors, by water input fluxes. In the landfill three physical phases are present: the
solid phase (waste), the liquid phase (leachate), and the gas phase. The liquid phase is enriched
by solubilized or suspended organic matter and inorganic ions from the solid phase. In the gas
phase mainly carbon (prevalently in the form of CO2 and CH4) is present. The main
environmental aspects of landfill leachate are the impacts on surface water quality and
groundwater quality if leachate is discharging into these water bodies (Christensen & Stegmann
1992).
 The term “leachate “refers to liquids that migrate from the waste carrying dissolved or
suspended contaminants. Leachate results from precipitation entering the landfill and from
moisture that exists in the waste when it is disposed. Contaminants in the buried refuse may
result from the disposal of industrial waste, ash, waste treatment sludge, household hazardous
wastes, or from normal waste decomposition. If uncontrolled, landfill leachate can be responsible
for contaminating ground water and surface water.

History of leachate

The History of Leachate

Leachate has been generated ever since man first congregated to form settlements, and
dug "middens" or pits, or created dung heaps. Of course the size of these was small and in all but
clay soils, the leachate formed would have largely soaked away unheeded, in small volumes
which would have created no significant impact other than potentially the positive enhancement
to nearby plant growth by locally elevating nutrient levels.

The hazards posed by the lack of good drainage and treatment of societies liquid wastes
(sewage) remained by far the most acute, in all civilisations until the latter quarter of the 20th
century, largely due to the vastly greater capability of sewage to provide a direct vector for
human disease. When considering landfill leachate hazards, this distinction should always be
made. Enteric organisms (of the stomach) and pathogenic organisms (capable of causing disease)
are simply not present in leachate to anything like the same degree as in sewage.

This remained the case until the late 1950s in the US, and the mid-seventies in the more
economically advanced nations within Europe and Asia. Until this time every home possessed
one or more open fire, and many possessed a garden or yard, in which green wastes would either
be burnt or routinely be composted in order to provide a free source of compost for the vegetable
garden. Indeed, the perceived need for good compost or manure was such that, even during my
post war (1950s) youth in South London, when deliveries made by house drawn vehicle resulted
in the presence of "droppings" in the street, these would be assiduously collected by the residents
for composting.

As a result pre-and post Second World war wastes comprised largely ashes, and inert
materials, there were of course progressively more metals present from tin cans, but the degree to
which putrescible kitchen wastes were present was low, and with plenty of alkaline material
present to provide a buffering capacity the pH would seldom drop to bring the hazardous heavy
metals into solution. In most towns in any event the sewer systems were combined foul and
stormwater systems, so if local urban tips needed draining they would simply discharge to sewer.
It was not a problem, as the sites were small and the contaminant strengths low, or comparable
with domestic foul sewage.

Click on this image to find out more about leachate history

In addition, with road transport links as yet still poorly developed, landfill sites (tips or
dumps) would be small, and with settlement rates low, these would often be redeveloped. In fact
in historical times middens would be built upon as a matter of course and the town ground level
would, in reality, gradually rise! Without this general build-up of material one wonders how
much of current archaeological evidence would have survived!
The history of leachate as currently found throughout the world, really starts when the
combination of greater affluence, central heating in cold climes to remove the previous high ash
content, the arrival of plastics, and the recognition of the need for landfill site control and
regulation, caused landfills to become much larger, and although more easily regulated,
potentially much more environmentally damaging.

In the UK it was the implementation of the 1974 Local Government Act which finally,
and indirectly, boosted the problem of landfill leachate into the consciousness of the ordinary
man. Although under this act the local government departments responsible for waste disposal
were also responsible for environmental standards enforcement (both poacher and gamekeeper),
standards of environmental monitoring rose rapidly. For the first time there came the realisation
that waste disposal to landfill in its modern guise could be much more damaging in some places
than others, due to local geology and the proximity of water usage for public supply, and at some
locations the impact on water resources, rivers and streams could be disastrous in terms of
possible loss of resources and ecological damage to rivers and streams.

In the UK by the late 1970s research was underway, on a newly coined concept, which
many said was no more than an ill-founded attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Landfill sites
were being chosen with permeable underlying geological strata to avoid the build-up of leachate
and these needed to be justified scientifically. It was the theory of "dilute, attenuate and
disperse", or the use of the natural pollutant attenuation capacity of many soils to arrest the
outward migration of contaminants for long enough to provide biological filtration and cation
exchange, which would, it was thought, limit the impact of the landfill to a very restricted
“unsaturated” zone around the landfill. As we will see in later sections of this discussion this
theory would depend on the capability of the unsaturated zone to remove ammoniacal nitrogen,
and to do this either physical treatment (eg cation exchange) would need to be present, or the
preservation of an aerobic (natural filter) zone under the landfill prior to discharge to
groundwater would be essential.

The technical and economic debate continued until the 1970s in the UK, about the
acceptability of "dilute, attenuate and disperse", while many European countries had already
decided only to select sites in groundwater free clay geological conditions, or to seal each site
with an engineered lining. The issue of whether to line landfills or not, was finally decided by the
EU Landfill Directive, and now all the current member states must comply with the Directives
policy which require all except truly inert landfills, to be lined with an impermeable membrane,
to prevent the escape of leachate.
In the US the accent had also developed quite rapidly from lining in principle, into the use of
multiple lining layers, most other nations have also since followed the same path, and landfill
sites all around the world began to be built to comply, and began also to fill with the water
percolating down through them from rainfall - and leachate as we know it today began to be for
2.0 Leachate Characterisation

How Leachate Changes in a Landfill Phase or Cell

When a new landfill "cell" (or "phase") receives the first waste for a short period, less
than a week in hot conditions and even while in transit in tropical climes - but possibly many
months in cold northern states - the degradation of the putrescible matter present begins. Until
degradation/rotting (which is an essentially biological process) starts, the levels of the various
contaminants may be quite low, but they very rapidly increase and the stage which is known as
the acetogenic stage commences. This stage is essentially one of aerobic bacterial fermentation
taking place on the chemicals released from the cells which have rapidly died and ruptured their
chemical contents into the highly odorous characteristically "leachate" sweet smelling, leachate.
As in any fermentation the pH falls (ie the acidity rises), and hazardous metals may then be
dissolved in significant concentrations. Certainly, much iron will be dissolved which imparts the
red and rusty hue of leachate wherever it leaks, or breaks out of landfills.

Clearly, the waste mass starts in an aerobic (aerated) environment and much oxygen is
also chemically bound into the waste mass and available at the start. However, sooner or later
(due to many factors including ambient temperature, rate of waste input, waste composition, etc)
the oxygen demand outstrips the available oxygen, and the waste mass turns anaerobic. This is
the start of the methanogenic (or methane generating) stage, but methane generation will only
commence in an anaerobic landfill when a sufficiently large population of methanogenic
organisms (methanogens) are present, and again the time this takes (and the resulting growth in
methane production) varies as it is affected by a host of factors.

The methanogenic phase will then continue for a very long period of time, with the
methane generation rate rising to a peak and then tailing off. During this period the ammoniacal
nitrogen concentration will hardly diminish, if at all.

Finally, once the methanogenic phase ends, air will again percolate into the waste mass
without being consumed and there will be a final return to aerobicity.
Even once this has happened it is thought that almost all landfills will still not have "flushed"
sufficiently that the leachate can be allowed to discharge innocuously into the environment, and
the liability of future generations to monitor and treat the leachate from these landfills remains
massive.

2.10 Leachate Quality

Leachate Quality - is it Toxic?

Leachate whether still acetogenic or older and methanogenic is in general quite capable
of causing oxygen deprived conditions in watercourses which put at risk the natural ecology. The
ammoniacal nitrogen concentrations vary massively form site to site, but also rise during the
later stages of the acetogenic stage, and at concentrations which vary according to the pH, but
always by the time 100 mg/l ammoniacal nitrogen is reached will be toxic to fish and many other
higher aquatic organisms.

In groundwaters the risk arises from the migration of leachate contamination into water
supplies where the presence of ammoniacal nitrogen is and even it's breakdown product nitrate
will render the groundwater unsuitable for drinking.

Nevertheless, the toxicity is not generally (if fact almost never) due to the presence of the
sorts of chemicals thought of as "poisons", while some of the more highly poisonous chemicals
are occasionally found, they are seen at minutely low concentrations, and the risk at these low
levels is far lower than generally perceived by the public.

Unfortunately, even dilute leachates which enter watercourses can cause the growth of
"sewage fungus", and this can be the case on occasions where the leachate would not otherwise
be significantly damaging. Sewage fungus grows to cover every surface, in the bed and all plant
life. It is grey/white in colour and looks builds up to become a matted covering of fungal growth
quite soon smothering the natural bed ecology.

In the UK, during the early 1990s substantial research work was done by Enviros, and funded by
the UK Government, to establish the "leachate source term". That is a very large number of
landfills were sampled and the results were summarised in landfill site categories. These
categories were selected to assist in prediction of leachate strengths when designing leachate
management plans for new landfills. The resulting report is available in hard copy at
approximately £50 from the UK Government HMSO.

Since then there have been updated sampling exercises carried out by Enviros for the
Environment Agency. One article which discusses the results is the Irish Waste Summit paper
presented by Howard Robinson, 2003, others are available on request.

One parameter which you will not see featured in UK work on leachate contaminants is
AOX. We simply do not find it a useful measure of toxicity.

2.11 Leachate Quantity

“How much leachate will a particular site produce?” - is always a difficult question. Clearly,
climate and particularly rainfall will be a big influence on this, but site operational practice (size
of cells, rate at which completed cells are capped etc), and the potential for dry incoming waste
to absorb leachate will all be important.

For a new landfill the only method available will be to model the site water balance from site
opening to closure on the basis of a wide ranging set of assumptions. The resulting choice of
plant size will then require the application of good judgement, based upon a sensitivity analysis
and a range of "scenarios".

Sizing a plant for an existing landfill site will be easier if good leachate generation rate data is
available, but it will usually also be necessary to take into account future development plans, and
the likely changing nature of the incoming wastes as recycling, and waste pre-processing alter
the nature of the waste residues being landfilled.

In most areas of the world a primary aim of waste management practise since the 1970s, or
earlier, has been to minimise the quantity of leachate generated. In the 1990s it was realised that,
now that proven leachate treatment technologies are available for leachate treatment, this was not
essential to minimise the environmental impact of leachate. In fact by minimising the generation
of leachate we are severely extending the period before landfills will become harmless to the
environment. No landfill will forever remain intact, and even the best designed containment
systems will eventually fail. The concern must be that this will put an excessive burden on future
generations, and that our current actions in sealing, and keeping dry vast tonnages of waste are
not sustainable.

Even a fairly simplistic analysis of the current very slow rate of "flushing" of lined and capped
landfills, shows that the rate of waste degradation and leaching will be extremely slow, with
projected stabilisation times of several hundreds of years and longer for very deep sites. Click
here to download a copy of an WordTM (.doc) article (from The Surveyor, 1993) which quite
simply explains in layman’s terms why current flushing rates will mean that modern landfills
will remain a liability to future generations for hundreds of years, and therefore current landfill
practices (which will remain the national landfilling policy throughout much of the developed
world for the foreseeable future), are not sustainable.

Waste degradation could be accelerated by circulating fluids through the waste in a controlled
manner, and operating the landfill as an engineered flushing bioreactor. This concept, which is
promoted in the UK by Waste Management Paper 26B (HMSO, London 1995), offers significant
environmental and economic benefits and is consistent with the aims of sustainable waste
management policy (Making waste work: a strategy for sustainable waste management: HMSO,
London, 1995).

Government and landfill industry research has been undertaken on this subject. The first issue to
establish was whether the permeability of the well compacted wastes in most landfills would be
sufficient for accelerated flushing to take place. This resulted in the construction of the Pitsea
compression cell which has been used to mimic the highly compressed waste conditions at the
base of landfills. We recommend that those interested visit the web page of SUnRISE which is
based in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of
Southampton to find out more about, "The influence of mechanical and hydrological properties
of waste on sustainable waste management practices".

Clearly, leachate quantity is a major consideration in the cost of leachate management, and while
currently all UK/ EU landfill operators operate on the principle of minimisation it should perhaps
be otherwise. Wherever sufficient water sources are available to resource the greater flushing
flow rates necessary, landfills would be better operated as sustainable flushing bioreactors.