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2.2 Topic e: Landfills

East Asia/Pacific

Landfilling is the cheapest and most prevalent method of MSW disposal in the region. The exhaustion of traditional disposal sites, stricter environmental controls, and greater quantities of wastes have resulted in high disposal costs, especially in medium and large cities of industrialized countries. Large cities in countries such as Australia, Japan, and Singapore have experienced a more than five-fold increase in such costs, and further increases are expected.

Countries like Australia and Japan normally classify landfills into three categories, according to whether they are intended for hazardous wastes, special wastes, or MSW. The design specifications of landfills for hazardous wastes are very stringent. These are constructed like a bathtub with several layers of impermeable liners and with leachate and gas control systems. Even for MSW, modern landfills at these cities are planned and constructed to minimize soil, groundwater, and surface water contamination from landfill leachate and the migration of landfill gas to surrounding areas. Landfill gases are sometimes collected for fuel. Some Japanese coastal cities (e.g., Kityakushu) use solid wastes for land reclamation, with sophisticated pre-treatment and compaction. In smaller towns near rural areas MSW contains fewer hazardous substances as compared to MSW in large cities, and regulations for landfill disposal of MSW tend to be less stringent.

In cities of developing countries, the main disposal practice for MSW is open dumping. Very often landfill sites are swamp lands or low-lying areas, the wastes being used for reclamation. Kuala Lumpur has used the old tin mines around the city. Although clay liners are occasionally used, little consideration is given to the water table and groundwater pollution and/or gas migration. The high percentage of organics, combined with much plastic which forms layers when compacted, contributes to the build-up of methane gases at dumps in cities like Bangkok and Manila; fires often break out and workers are made ill by the gases.

Thus, these dump sites are essentially uncontrolled, creating considerable health, safety, and environmental problems. It is difficult for these cities to adopt the regulations of industrialized nations. Affordable and appropriate waste disposal practices and policies with provision for flexibility in the development of waste management policies are needed.

Some cities of developing countries in the region, including Bandung, Jakarta, and Manila, do have well-designed and reasonably operated sanitary landfills. There has been much progress throughout the region in this regard over the last decade or so.

At Jayapura in Irian Jaya, wastes are dumped and then partly burned; some of the burned wastes are pushed off a cliff into the sea. Hence, disposal here combines open dumping, burning, and sea disposal.

South and West Asia

Open dumping is the most common method of waste disposal throughout the region. Especially in the Indian subcontinent, and for smaller cities and towns, it is a crude dumping of waste, sometimes with sparse cover, and sometimes combined with partial burning in the dry season. Frequently, municipalities dump wastes in low-lying land, rather than at designated dump sites, literally as landfill; for this reason the site in these cases is not permitted to rise above grade, as it is designated for development. Private landowners who wish to have depressions filled accept municipal wastes. Filling of wetlands with wastes has been important (e.g., in the land development of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Colombo).

Metropolitan cities, and the main cities in the northern and central areas, have dumps that may be designated landfills, although rarely are all the components of good landfill practice present. Problems of shortage of cover, lack of leachate collection and treatment, inadequate compaction, poor site design, and many pickers working at the site are common.

In cities where plastic shopping bags are used to put out wastes for collection, waste pickers sometimes set refuse alight in order to find metal cans. Spontaneous fires also break out on dumps. This greatly adds to the air pollution from dumps, legal and illegal, in cities like Karachi and Tehran.

There is rarely any controlled disposal of hazardous, biomedical, or slaughterhouse wastes, although certain areas of dumps are usually designated for slaughterhouse and biomedical wastes.

In the subcontinent, many dumps are inadequately constructed and maintained due to lack of equipment. The roads leading to dumps and those on dumps themselves are often elementary, becoming impassable in the wet season.

Wastes are illegally dumped in water bodies of all kinds, especially by settlements that are denied municipal collection. In a few cases sea disposal is carried out by the municipal authorities. More solid waste reaches the sea after being dumped illegally in rivers and canals.

Since most large dumps have hundreds of extra workers in the form of waste pickers, and the municipal workers are not provided with protective gear, the health risks at dumps are much higher than in sanitary landfills in industrialized countries. These workers are exposed to risks from human feces, slaughterhouse wastes, landfill gases, toxic dust, infectious biomedical wastes, snakes, scorpions, broken glass, and explosions. Deaths have occurred when waste pickers, including children, were buried while mining for recyclables in dumps.

Planning for environmentally safe landfills, monitoring their future impacts, and site remediation are rarely undertaken in the poorer countries of South and West Asia. Dump sites are almost always used after closure, often immediately, either as building sites or for farming. Lack of planning, use of inappropriate equipment, and untrained personnel hold back improvements.

In the central countries, although landfills are designed and operated by the relevant authorities and are situated on sites owned by them, awareness about monitoring the long-term environmental impacts of waste disposal is still low. An exception is the newly industrialized city of Jubail, Saudi Arabia, whose landfill is divided into three areas, for hazardous, putrescible, and inert wastes. The site is lined and continually monitored with systematic data collection. The Ministry of Environment in Israel has closed down and remediated a number of improper dumping sites recently. The country is now planning for environmentally sound landfills using state-of-the-art technologies.

Gas capture has been tried on an experimental basis in just a few cases, for instance, in New Delhi, where gas is supplied to a nearby hospital. In India, there is some cultural inhibition to using gas from dumps for domestic cooking.

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