Based upon a rough estimation, Europe counts more than 150.000 landfills. Most of them are old and abandoned landfills. The total costs of traditional aftercare of old and abandoned landfills in Europe is roughly valued at € 40.000 to 50.000 million (€ 40-50 billion). This is a hugh amount of money, which can hardly be financed from public environmental budgets only.
Application of new aftercare technologies, such as Natural Attenuation, will already help to lower the costs of aftercare significantly. But investments from the private (a.o. real estate) sector within the framework of redevelopment of the landfill site is really one of the best ways to finance the aftercare costs. Depending on the type of re-use (housing, industrial area, office buildings, etc.), the private sector will take care of the aftercare costs by discounting them in the total costs of redevelopment of the landfill site.
Especially in urban areas the re-use of old landfill sites can be considered as privileged. A combination of relative low aftercare costs due to natural self-cleaning processes in the landfill (Natural Attenuation) and high benefits by redevelopment projects of housing, office buildings, industrial area is the most favourable opportunity.
In urban areas the subject of contamination can not be avoided. It is an illusion to think that one can still build on clean land in an urban environment. So the most important prerequisite is the cleaning up the landfill site in order to make it acceptable i.e. suitable for the intended re-use.
For old landfills especially, the province of Brabant in the Netherlands is trendsetter to this subject by making a memorandom ‘Re-use of landfills’, including granding subsidy, to stimulate redevelopment initiatives.