Landfill mining: resource potential of Austrian landfills – evaluation and quality assessment of recovered municipal solid waste by chemical analyses

Since the need for raw materials in countries undergoing industrialisation (like China) is rising, the availability of metal and fossil fuel energy resources (like ores or coal) has changed in recent years. Landfill sites can contain considerable amounts of recyclables and energy-recoverable materials, therefore, landfill mining is an option for exploiting dumped secondary raw materials, saving primary sources. For the purposes of this article, two sanitary landfill sites have been chosen for obtaining actual data to determine the resource potential of Austrian landfills. To evaluate how pretreating waste before disposal affects the resource potential of landfills, the first landfill site has been selected because it has received untreated waste, whereas mechanically–biologically treated waste was dumped in the second. The scope of this investigation comprised: (1) waste characterisation by sorting analyses of recovered waste; and (2) chemical analyses of specific waste fractions for quality assessment regarding potential energy recovery by using it as solid recovered fuels. The content of eight heavy metals and the net calorific values were determined for the chemical characterisation tests. </jats:p

Landfill mining: development of a theoretical method for a preliminary estimate of the raw material potential of landfill sites

In recent years, the rising need for raw materials by emerging economies (e.g. China) has led to a change in the availability of certain primary raw materials, such as ores or coal. The accompanying rising demand for secondary raw materials as possible substitutes for primary resources, the soaring prices and the global lack of specific (e.g. metallic) raw materials pique the interest of science and economy to consider landfills as possible secondary sources of raw materials. These sites often contain substantial amounts of materials that can be potentially utilised materially or energetically. To investigate the raw material potential of a landfill, boreholes and excavations, as well as subsequent hand sorting have proven quite successful. These procedures, however, are expensive and time consuming as they frequently require extensive construction measures on the landfill body or waste mass. For this reason, this article introduces a newly developed, affordable, theoretical method for the estimation of landfill contents. The article summarises the individual calculation steps of the method and demonstrates this using the example of a selected Austrian sanitary landfill. To assess the practicality and plausibility, the mathematically determined raw material potential is compared with the actual results from experimental studies of excavated waste from the same landfill (actual raw material potential)