Intensified Monitoring as a Basis for Documentation and Evaluation of Landfill Aftercare

SUMMARY: Landfill aftercare lasts until the authorities consider a landfill not to pose a threat to human health and the environment. To evaluate aftercare, it is necessary to gain an understanding of the waste emission behaviour, the long-term barrier performance, and the impact of substances released to the environment. Because appropriate models for emissions from waste are highly dependent on full-scale monitoring data, it is the aim of this study to illustrate monitoring procedures suitable for generating data to establish such models. Based on a case study about an Austrian landfill, it could be shown that process-oriented monitoring data form the basis for calibrating and validating (long-term) leachate emission models, on the one hand, and for providing reliable documentation of leachate emission developments, on the other hand. Therefore, intensified leachate monitoring schemes were implemented also at three other closed MSW landfills in Austria, where process-oriented monitoring is expected to provide a basis for robust evaluation and optimization of aftercare.