Landfills

New, natural, self-renewing, and low-cost, evapotranspiration (ET) covers for landfills provide a solution to landfill waste that is clean, green, and economical. Evapotranspiration Covers for Landfills and Waste Sites examines the concept theory and the practical proof, then explains the technology, design, and application. It delineates the essential technology that governs successful application of ET covers and discusses how the technology meets the requirements for covers on landfills, mining waste, and other sites. The book describes the design, construction, and maintenance of innovative ET covers for landfills and waste. The author discusses why several vegetative covers have failed and provides simple, inexpensive solutions. He examines the design and construction of ET covers and other methods, highlighting their differences and successful alternative construction methods. The text contains the first proposed performance measurements for conventional and innovative landfill covers based on the data collected at more than fifty-five sites. This data also provides the basis for an assessment of landfill cover performance, design, and the creation of the site-specific performance criteria presented in the book. This is the first resource to explore the technology required to apply the ET cover concept to landfill waste, spill sites, mineland restoration, and similar waste sites. After thoroughly describing the concept, technology, design, construction, and maintenance of ET covers, the book explains how this cost-effective, practical, easily maintained, and self-renewing biological system should maintain its effectiveness for centuries.

Municipal solid waste entombed in landfills will produce pollution in the form of landfill gas and leachate when the barriers fail in the long term. Bioreactor landfills are an alternative solution to avoid such negative impacts and to achieve a more stable residue, the so-called Final Storage Quality (FSQ) of residues. However, until now the main technical problem faced by landfill operators in bioreactor landfill operation is homogenous liquid distribution within the waste mass. The main objective of this thesis was to achieve a FSQ status of waste, through laboratory and pilot-scale experiments, that complies with the Waste Acceptance Criteria (WAC) of the European Landfill Directive for inert waste. This thesis focused on the interaction and modification of the factors controlling the waste stabilisation process in a bioreactor landfill. The results revealed that within a year of operation biological stabilisation can be achieved, but not FSQ status. However, residues were close to comply with such stringent criteria. Buffer and septage addition had a positive effect on the waste stabilisation process by reducing biogas production lag-phase and risks associated with pathogen contamination. Also the use of coarse materials had a positive impact on the waste stabilisation process, especially as homogenous mixtures. The presence of Anammox bacteria - shown for the first time to be active in a bioreactor landfill - suggested that it could have contributed substantially to the removal of nitrogen, which has been identified as the main parameter to jeopardise the achievement of FSQ status. In conclusion, this research reduced our current gaps-in-knowledge and offered feasible technical alternatives to control and steer the processes occurring in a bioreactor landfill aiming to achieve FSQ status of residues.

Over the past hundred years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; ocean-going aliens, not refugees. They are too big for the world they have entered. Their story is our story too. Landfill is the original and compelling story of how in the Anthropocene we have learned about the natural world, named and catalogued it, and then colonized it, planted it, or filled it with our junk. While most other birds have gone in the opposite direction, hiding away from us, some vanishing forever, gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world. For these reasons Landfill is the nature book for our times, groundbreaking and genre-bending. Without nostalgia or eulogy, it kicks beneath the littered surface of the things to discover stranger truths.