Environmental pollution and health threats as well as scarcity of raw materials, water, food and energy are among the main challenges our world are now facing. Simultaneously, landfills and open dumpsites still are the dominant global waste disposal option even with their long term environmental impacts in case of greenhouse gases and contaminated leachates. In this thesis, landfill mining is suggested as a tool that should be included in an enhanced circular economy model (repair, reuse and recycle + extract and recovery) by considering the extraction/recovery of the lost materials in landfills and dumpsites as secondary resources.

Characterization data (composition and physicochemical properties) is considered as a vital source for information for: i. the valorization of excavated wastes, ii. to explore potential hazards and iii. as an important tool for theassessment of the waste management systems and policies. In this thesis,excavated wastes from a classic landfill (Högbytorp in Sweden), a landfill buildup according to the European Directive requirements (Torma in Estonia) andhazardous glass dumpsite (Pukeberg in Sweden) was characterized as a centralstep in exploring the potential of recovering of valuables. In addition, the extraction of trace elements from waste glass and different finefractions were also investigated. The reduction-melting method was developedto extract hazardous concentrations of trace elements from old art and crystalglasses with more than (99%) of recovery of Pb, Cd and As. While threechelating agents (EDTA, DTPA and NTA) were used to extract Pb, Cd, Asand Zn from fine fraction (<2 mm) sampled from Pukeberg glasswork with anextraction efficiency of (40%). Besides, the fractionations of the metals Cu, Znand Cr in the fine fractions (<10 mm) excavated from Högbytorp and Tormalandfills were studied by using a modified sequential extraction procedure.

The findings of this thesis highlighted the need to consider the dumped wastesas secondary resources and landfills and dumpsites as future bank accounts offuture raw materials instead of being burden to the human health and theenvironment.