Impact of Municipal and Industrial Non-Hazardous Waste Landfills on Public Health and the Environment: An Overview

Classical unlined sanitary landfills are well-known to release large amounts of hazardous and otherwise deleterious chemicals to nearby groundwater and to the air, via leachate ("garbage juice") and landfill gas. It is known that such releases contain a wide variety of potential carcinogens and potentially toxic chemicals that represent a threat to public health. However, little quantitative information exists on the total hazard that landfills represent to those who live or otherwise use properties near the landfill. Epidemiological studies of the "exposed" populations near landfills and Superfund sites have not detected a clearly discernible increase in the incidence of cancer in those populations. This is to be expected because of the insensitivity of epidemiological methods for detecting small increases in cancer incidence in limited populations over the normal lifetime cancer risk for the US population of one cancer in three people. It would be rare that a sufficient number of individuals near Superfund site landfills would experience an average increased cancer risk of 1 in 1,000.