Based upon a rough estimation Europe counts more than 150.000 landfills. It is 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 (1999/31/EC).
And 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 protectionmeasures at these landfills. In compliance with the requirements of the EU-directive and other relevant environmental legislation, 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 provinces and Ministry of Environment, Royal Haskoning has 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 strategy has already been applied at more than 300 landfills in The Netherlands and abroad (Hungary and Lithuania). 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 classic “basic monitoring” systems. The next step is to convince the Dutch and EC-authorities of the added value of NA-groundwatermonitoring in order to be able to implement NA-groundwatermonitoring at all landfills in the Netherlands and other European countries.