Assessment of a residual municipal solid waste landfill for prospective ‘landfill mining’

Abstract

Landfill mining is a prospective tool for the recycling of valuable materials (waste-to-material) and secondary fuel (waste-to-energy) from old, therefore more or less stabilised municipal solid waste landfills. The main target of Horizon 2020 ‘SMARTGROUND’ R&D was improving the availability and accessibility of data and information from both urban landfills and mining dumps through a set of activities to integrate all the data – from existing sources and new information retrieved with time progress – in a single EU database. Concerning urban landfills, a new sampling protocol was designed on the basis of the current Hungarian national municipal solid waste analysis standards, optimised for landfill mining. This protocol was then applied in a sampling campaign on a municipal solid waste landfill in Debrecen, Hungary. The composition and parameters of the landfilled materials were measured as a 12-year timescale. The total wet and dry mass of the valuable components possible for utilisation was estimated.