Factoring Site Age in Evaluation of Groundwater-Contamination Hazard Rating of Abandoned Municipal Solid-Waste Landfill Sites
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 137, Issue 11
Abstract
A time-dependent system for evaluating the groundwater-contamination hazard rating of uncontrolled municipal solid-waste landfills has been reported elsewhere. While prioritizing uncontrolled landfills for remedial actions, this system (TD-HARAS) accords equal importance to the groundwater contamination caused by a landfill in the past and the contamination to be caused in the future. Some policymakers may like to remediate first those landfills that have greater potential for future contamination; landfill age then becomes an important factor to be taken into consideration for landfill prioritization. In this note, the mathematical framework of TD-HARAS has been extended to allow differential importance to past and future contaminations and to incorporate site age in the assessment of the groundwater-contamination hazard rating of landfill sites. A sensitivity analysis of the extended system (ETD-HARAS) shows that the groundwater-contamination hazard rating of a landfill site decreases with increases in the site age. A comparison of ETD-HARAS with selected existing hazard-rating systems shows that although ETD-HARAS produces significantly differing scores for different landfills and thus responds to varied site conditions, the existing systems individually produce clustered scores and return the same rank to more than one landfill. Thus, ETD-HARAS makes a better basis for site prioritization for taking remedial actions.
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Acknowledgments
The writers wish to thank M/s Housing & Urban Development Corporation Ltd. (HUDCO), New Delhi and the Commission of European Union for supporting the Ph.D. studies of the first writer, of which the present manuscript is a part.
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© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: May 15, 2010
Accepted: Apr 28, 2011
Published online: Oct 14, 2011
Published in print: Nov 1, 2011
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