Natural Attenuation and groundwatermonitoring
Based upon a rough estimation Europe counts more than 150.000 landfills. It a mixture of old and abandoned landfills, recently closed landfills and landfills still in operation. The operational and recently closed landfills should meet the the operational and technical requirements of the EU-directive on the landfilling of waste. At the old and abandoned landfills aftercare measures must be taken to protect the groundwater and soil from contamination, due to the lack of any environmental protection measures at these landfills.
In compliance with these current legislations, groundwatermonitoring systems should be installed, the so-called “traditional monitoring”. This “traditional monitoring” takes not into account the advancing technology with respect to “Natural Attenuation (NA)”. In collaboration with Dutch waste management companies as well as the Dutch Ministeries and provinces, Royal Haskoning developed a new strategy and methodology for NA-groundwatermonitoring, which can be applied in the operational phase as well as in the after care phase of a landfill.
This new NA-strategy has already been applied at more than 300 landfills in The Netherlands and abroad (Hungary, Lithuania, etc.). It can be concluded that NA-groundwatermonitoring results into a more sustainable and more cost-effective strategy of groundwatermonitoring of landfills in comparison to the “traditional monitoring systems”.