Hunting for valuables from landfills and assessing their market opportunities: A case study with Kudjape landfill in EstoniaShow others and affiliations
2017 (English)In: Waste Management & Research, ISSN 0734-242X, E-ISSN 1096-3669, Vol. 35, no 6, p. 627-635Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Landfill mining is an alternative technology that merges the ideas of material recycling and sustainable waste management. This paper reports a case study to estimate the value of landfilled materials and their respective market opportunities, based on a full-scale landfill mining project in Estonia. During the project, a dump site (Kudjape, Estonia) was excavated with the main objectives of extracting soil-like final cover material with the function of methane degradation. In total, about 57,777 m(3) of waste was processed, particularly the uppermost 10-year layer of waste. Manual sorting was performed in four test pits to determine the detailed composition of wastes. 11,610 kg of waste was screened on site, resulting in fine (<40 mm) and coarse (>40 mm) fractions with the share of 54% and 46%, respectively. Some portion of the fine fraction was sieved further to obtain a very fine grained fraction of <10 mm and analyzed for its potential for metals recovery. The average chemical composition of the <10 mm soil-like fraction suggests that it offers opportunities for metal (Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn) extraction and recovery. The findings from this study highlight the importance of implementing best available site-specific technologies for on-site separation up to 10 mm grain size, and the importance of developing and implementing innovative extraction methods for materials recovery from soil-like fractions.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2017. Vol. 35, no 6, p. 627-635
Keywords [en]
Landfill mining, waste characterization, landfill plastic, solid recovered fuel, metals recovery
National Category
Environmental Sciences
Research subject
Natural Science, Environmental Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-66971DOI: 10.1177/0734242X17697816ISI: 000402638600008PubMedID: 28566034Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85020214301OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-66971DiVA, id: diva2:1127887
2017-07-202017-07-202019-08-29Bibliographically approved