Environment

Exploitation and aftercare of existing landfills must meet the requirements of the Dutch Directive of Landfilling, wich has been based on the EU Council Directive 1999/31/EC of 26 April 1999 on the landfilling of waste. This means the application and execution of top-liners, geohydrological containment measures and the monitoring of groundwaterquality. These aftercare measures are everlasting and also expensive. Moreover, this way of isolating the waste from its environment is not a sustainable environmental solution, because the waste itself remains an everlasting source of pollution and next generations will be burdened with an unsolved problem.

New technological insights make it possible to consider a landfill to be a dynamic biochemical and physicochemical reactor instead of a static landfill body. This means that natural processes, called “Natural Attenuation (NA)” in the landfill, are able to neutralize the concentrations of all types of contaminants in the land filled waste to admissible emission levels.

The natural self-cleaning capacity of NA in landfills has never been demonstrated in a full-scale situation. In collaboration with RDH, Royal Haskoning has developed a new strategy and methodology based on NA, the so called SANA-model (Sustainable Aftercare bases on Natural Attenuation). This SANA-model can be applied in the operational phase as well as in the after care phase of a landfill. This SANA-model is demonstrated at the Vlagheide landfill at full scale by means of a extensive research program over the period 2005-2012. The final result will be a fully operational concept for sustainable and cost saving aftercare of landfills, based on Natural Attenuation.

This demonstration project must prove the capability of  NA to phase out inadmissible emission of contaminants to groundwater and surfacewater. This prove will be required by competent authorities in order to adjust legislation, which will allow the application of  NA-aftercare.