Quantifying capital goods for waste landfilling.

Area of Science:

• Environmental Engineering
• Waste Management
• Life Cycle Assessment

Background:

• Landfills are critical components of waste management infrastructure.
• Understanding the environmental footprint of landfill construction is essential for sustainable practices.
• Previous studies often focus on operational impacts, neglecting construction-phase burdens.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantify the materials and energy consumed in constructing a 4 million m³ hill-type landfill.
• To model the potential environmental impacts associated with landfill construction.
• To compare construction impacts with operational impacts reported in existing literature.

Main Methods:

• Detailed quantification of materials (gravel, clay, steel) and energy used in construction.
• Life cycle assessment (LCA) modeling to estimate environmental burdens.
• Calculation of potential impacts, including global warming (kg CO2 equivalents) and human toxicity (milli person equivalents) per tonne of waste.

Main Results:

• Gravel and clay were the dominant materials, totaling approximately 260 kg per tonne of waste.
• Construction phase impacts, such as global warming (2.5 kg CO2 eq./tonne) and human toxicity (0.32 mPE/tonne), were found to be low.
• Resource depletion was identified as a significant impact, primarily due to high gravel and steel consumption.

Conclusions:

• The environmental impacts of landfill construction are generally low to insignificant compared to operational phases.
• Resource depletion is the main environmental concern during the construction of landfills.
• Further research should focus on sustainable material sourcing and design to mitigate construction-related impacts.