Topsoil carbon stocks in urban greenspaces of the Hague, the Netherlands

Industrial Ecolog

Advantages of the amazing sub-surface

Geoscience & EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Quantification of long term emission potential from landfills

Novel approaches for the after-care of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfills are based on technological measures to reduce the long term emission potential in a short time period. Biological degradation in landfills is a means to significantly reduce the long term emission potential. Leachate emission to the groundwater is considered to be one of the largest long-term impacts related to landfilling. Currently we are starting up a research program, partly subsidized by the Dutch Technology foundation STW, aimed towards developing a frame work which allows for a quantitative assessment of the long-term emission potential of a landfill. The research program is closely connected to demonstration-projects which will be carried out by the Dutch landfill operators Afvalzorg and Attero. These projects aim to demonstrate the reduction of long-term emission potential by a combination of leachate recirculation and landfill aeration. This project aims to develop an original and efficient measurement, monitoring and modeling framework for 1) quantification of the long-term emission potential of landfill bodies (with and without stabilization) and 2) optimization of the applied landfill stabilization technology for reducing the emission potential. Three sub-projects will be carried out within the STW subsidized program: 1. Integration of high resolution geophysical measurements with 3D process modeling to obtain 3D-time lapse images of processes in the landfill body; 2. Quantification of bio-geochemical heterogeneous activity in full-scale landfills; 3. Integrated modeling and up-scaling of landfill processes and heterogeneity; 4. In addition to the above mentioned projects which are going to start in the first half of 2011, a PhD-project started in September 2010 focusing on quantification of the flow processes controlling the long-term emission potential.Geoscience & EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Geophysical monitoring of in situ redox processes (abstract)

Geoscience & EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience

Suitability of different conceptual models for assessing the hydrology of a full scale pilot landfill

Leachate emission to the groundwater is considered to be one of the largest longterm impacts related to landfilling. Recently we started a program, partly subsidized by the Dutch Technology foundation STW, aimed towards developing a frame work which allows for a quantitative assessment of the long-term emission potential of a landfill. The research program is closely connected to a number of pilot-projects which will be carried out by the Dutch landfill operators Afvalzorg and Attero. These pilots aim to reduce the long-term emission potential by a combination of leachate recirculation and landfill aeration. This research program will test innovative monitoring techniques, carry out additional monitoring, and develop a modeling frame work in order to get as much information as possible from the pilot projects. Within this program a PhD-project started in September 2010 which is focused on quantification of the hydrological processes involved in controlling the long-term emission potential. A large number of different approaches have been used in the past to describe landfill hydrology. These concepts range from fully mechanistic approaches based on the Richards equation and water retention curves to fully empirical exponential release curves. Currently we are evaluating how the different approaches used in the past can be used within the context of the pilot projects and our research program. We will present a range of different concepts and compare the performance of these concepts with respect to aspects which we deem important such as preferential flow, leachate production with time, peak delay time as a result of precipitation events etc. Parametrization and impact of heterogeneity will also be taken in to account as well.Geoscience & EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience