Climate-Resilient Biogeochemical Cover for Waste Containment Systems
Publication: Geo-Extreme 2021
ABSTRACT
The waste containment systems which form an important part of the waste management and environmental protection strategies are highly vulnerable to the impacts of extreme climatic events and are prone to causing colossal and long-term damage to environment upon failure. For example, the extreme precipitation may reduce the infiltration resistance of landfill cover systems causing seepage of toxic leachate into the subsurface and surrounding environment. Similarly, extreme drought events may lead to drying up of the landfill cover giving rise to formation of cracks and ultimately releases of the harmful landfill gas in undesirable amounts. Hence, there is an urgent need to analyze the vulnerability of the waste containment systems and incorporate resilient designs to adapt to extreme climatic events. Toward this goal, this study presents development of a sustainable cover system for municipal solid waste landfills with primary goal to mitigate methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide from fugitive landfill gas that can also adapt to the impacts of changing climate and extreme weather events such as flooding, erosion, drought, saltwater intrusion, and high temperatures. The proposed cover, also called biogeochemical cover, uses sustainable materials such as biochar-amended soil and steel slag. A comprehensive experimental study evaluated the resilience of the biogeochemical cover system under selected extreme climatic conditions. In particular, the methane oxidation potential and microbial community response were evaluated in detail under widely varying moisture (0%–40% w/w), and temperature (5°C–70°C) conditions. The results demonstrated that the extreme environmental conditions such as high temperature (70°C) and wetting (moisture content >30%) impact the performance of the cover components mainly the biologic component. Nevertheless, the proposed cover components showed satisfactory performance under diverse climatic conditions showing greater resiliency to extreme events. However, the same needs to be further researched in detail under field conditions to verify the resiliency of the proposed cover system.
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Geo-Extreme 2021
Pages: 189 - 199
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Published online: Nov 4, 2021
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Cited by
- Jyoti K. Chetri, Krishna R. Reddy, Stefan J. Green, Methane Oxidation and Microbial Community Dynamics in Activated Biochar-Amended Landfill Soil Cover, Journal of Environmental Engineering, 10.1061/(ASCE)EE.1943-7870.0001984, 148, 4, (2022).