Waste Management, Landfills and Sustainability

Waste management is one of the core themes of sustainability, but achieving sustainable waste management is a challenging and complex task. Despite the fact that an increasing amount of waste has been reused and recycled, landfills still play an important role in the management of wastes.

However, waste degradation in landfill produce leachate and harmful gases viz. carbon dioxide, methane which are considered as greenhouse gases. It has been studied that leachate contribute to 20% emission of greenhouse gases. This can largely risk human health as well as threat to environment. Furthermore, it contains low concentration of gases with heavy aromatic rings, most of which are toxic in nature.

Movements of leachate create problem as aquifers need more time for rehabilitation. Leachate can migrate to groundwater or surface water and have potential threat to drinking water. Construction of landfills have adverse effects on aquaculture and habitats by diffusing leachate into surface and groundwater with limited on-site recycling activities. Various studies also claim that residential areas close to landfill sites have low-housing values because people don’t prefer to live close to the area enriched with flies, mosquitoes, bacteria and bad odours.

The lower calorific value of wastes lowers the significance of waste-to-energy technologies, such as incineration and gasification, and make waste-to-energy less viable as solution for waste management solution. The low calorific value is an important outcome of waste collection process.

Waste scavengers often collect in a mixed state with all type of wastes, which include reusable materials, plastic, glass bottles etc. which reduces the calorific value and combustibility of waste. Waste is usually sorted out manually and unfortunately it becomes very difficult to regulate and implement an efficient method. This kind of waste recovery methods is very common in Asian countries e.g. India, Indonesia etc. using improper waste management technique can cause contaminated soil, water and environment.

Water is most easy to contaminate as it dissolves chemicals easily, causing harm to all living organisms including humans. Animal and marine life is most impacted with water contamination. It also restricts our use of water for drinking and cooking purposes without a proper cleaning system. The improper management of waste is also detrimental for environmental health.

Greenhouse gases are generated from decomposition of waste, these gases are the major cause of global warming affecting air precipitation, causing acid rain to severe hailstorms. Moreover, humans who live near the garbage dumping area are found to be at severe risk of respiratory diseases, skin problems, cancer etc.

With proper awareness and adoption of efficient waste management practices, we can achieve sustainable solutions to waste management. A good example is that of the Japanese town of Kamikatsu which is a zero-waste urban center where waste is meticulously sorted into 45 categories. Although the zero waste targets have almost been achieved, the residual waste issue is going to be major hurdle as Kamikatsu have very limited space available for landfill.

The lack of availability of space for residual waste is going to be major problem in future because of shortage of landfills, degraded quality of household and formation of leachate. And unfortunately, this issue is not going to be solved very soon.