Material recovery from landfills
The ultimate ambition is a world without waste, which is the ideal situation according to the principle of Cradle to Cradle®. However it takes some time before this will become reality. In the meantime a transition-process is currently going on from the traditional waste management (recycling, incineration, landfilling) to sustainable material management. Or in other words: a shift in awareness from reducing the negative impact of waste management to the added value of the positive impact of resource recovery and chain management. During this transition process and taking into account the approaching scarcity of raw materials and precious metals, we should try to manage our waste as sustainable as possible.
From that perspective it also can be justified to examine the added value of recyling our ‘historical’ waste, which has been landfilled all over Europe in the last 50 years. Europe counts over a 150,000 landfills, which represent an estimated total volume of 30 to 50 billion m3 of waste. This huge quantity of waste also represents a huge potential of materials to be recovered and recycled (Materials from Landfills: MFL) and/or of energy from additional biogas (methane and carbon dioxide) to be recovered using the concept of sustainable landfill management (SLM).
Of course a profitable exploitation of resource recovery and/or energy recovery from landfills depends on a lot of factors such as the spatial distribution of the landfills, the specific local circumstances such as tax regime, supply and demand of raw materials, the market prices of raw materials and precious metals. This varies per EU-country. Nevertheless, in times of climate change and an approaching shortage of raw materials and precious metals, it is an opportunity to deal with our existing landfills in an environment-friendly way fitting in the framework of resource recovery and chain management.