Environmental Justice has a great website with many fun to know facts on landfills.
http://www.ejnet.org/landfills/
Zero Waste America also has a great website. Contained therein is a wealth of information on landfills, including videos, photos, reports and links to yet more information.
http://zerowasteamerica.org/zwa/Landfills.htm
From the Zero Waste summary:
Municipal landfills and their leachate (water) and air emissions are hazardous. Municipal landfills can accept hazardous waste under federal law. An unlimited number of ‘conditionally exempt small generators’ of hazardous waste have access to municipal landfills.
All landfills will eventually fail and leak leachate into ground and surface water. Plastics are not inert. State-of-the-art plastic (HDPE) landfill liners (1/10 inch or 100 mils thick) and plastic pipes allow chemicals and gases to pass through their membranes, become brittle, swell, and breakdown.
"…82% of surveyed landfill cells had leaks while 41% had a leak area of more than 1 square feet," according to Leak Location Services, Inc. (March 15, 2000).
According to Dr. Fred Lee, "detection in new landfills can be difficult since the only way to know this is detection in the monitoring wells.The likelihood of a monitoring well at a single or double lined landfill detecting an initial leak is very small." Monitoring wells should be located in areas most likely to detect contamination (i.e., testing the ground water after it has passed under the landfill.) Lined landfills leak in very narrow plumes, whereas old, unlined landfills will produce wide plumes of leachate.
Old and new landfills are typically located next to large bodies of water (i.e., rivers, lakes, bays, etc), making leakage detection and remediation (clean-up) extremely difficult. This is due to the incursion of surface water in both instances. Federal and state governments have allowed landfill operators to locate landfills next to water bodies under the misguided principle: Detection by monitoring wells can also be very difficult at lined landfills. Lined landfills leak in very narrow plumes, whereas old, unlined landfills will produce wide plumes of leachate.
Ground water flows downstream, or toward nearby lakes and rivers.In some cases, monitoring wells have been located around landfills in areas least likely to detect leakage (i.e., upstream of the groundwater flow). This is in violation of federal law. If a landfill is located next to a water body, then the monitoring wells should be located between the landfill and the water; or (if there is no space left), in the water.
All landfills could require remediation, but particularly landfills built in the last 60 years will require a thorough clean-up due to the disposal of highly toxic chemicals manufactured and sold since the 1940’s.
