Landfilling: Concepts and Challenges

Landfilling of waste historically has been the main management route for waste, and in many parts of the world it still is. Landfills have developed from open polluting dumps to modern highly engineered facilities with sophisticated control measures and monitoring routines. However, in spite of all new approaches and technological advancement the landfill still is a long lasting accumulation of waste in the environment. Much of current landfill design and technology has been introduced as a reaction to problems encountered at actual landfills. The solution was in many cases sought in isolation of the waste. Although this prevents immediate emission, isolation at the same time is a conservation of potential emission. This potential emission materializes when the isolation fails at some point in time. Therefore it is of importance in the striving for sustainable waste management solutions to understand the concepts, the processes and the long-term aspects of landfilling. This chapter describes the main conceptual aspects of landfilling. The historical development is presented and key issues of time frames, mass balances and technical approaches are discussed. The environmental issues of landfilling are described in Chapter 10.2 while specific types of landfilling technology are described in Chapter 10.5 (mineral waste landfill), Chapter 10.6 (reactor landfill) and Chapter 10.7 (pretreated waste landfill).