The Environment Research and Education Foundation (EREF) has awarded a research grant in excess of $1 million to an NC State professor in an effort to better understand and predict temperatures in municipal solid waste landfills.
This is the largest single award EREF has given in its 23-year history, according to Bryan Staley, EREFs President and CEO, in a press release.
“The project will provide critical insight into a phenomenon that has puzzled the industry for the past few years,” Staley said.
Morton Barlaz, professor and head of the department of civil, construction and environmental engineering, is working alongside partners from the University of Virginia and The City College of New York to explain why a limited number of landfills in North America are experiencing elevated temperatures.
Once the project has been concluded, landfill owners and operators will have a practical methodology to predict heat accumulation in landfills. The methodology can then be used to prevent excessive heat generation.
“It is a problem where any progress we make sooner than that will be good,” Barlaz said.
Elevated temperatures in landfills result in more harmful leachate — the liquid that has collected harmful substances and leaked into the surrounding environment.
“[This] makes it more expensive to treat,” Barlaz said. “So [obtaining] this knowledge is important because we need to understand this element of behavior that we are seeing in a few landfills so that we can design and operate all landfills in a way that is safe for the environment”.
The project began in December of 2014, and is expected to take three years to complete.
EREF is the only private, grant-making institution with a national and international scope whose sole mission is to support solid waste research and education initiatives.
“These situations have posed significant operational challenges, and there is only anecdotal evidence to the underlying cause,” said Craig Benson in a press release, dean of the school of engineering and applied science at UVA.
While none of the landfills that are hotter than what would be predicted based on typical biological reactions are in North Carolina, these landfills are already starting to cause environmental and financial problems that could extend to landfills across the country if the problem goes unsolved.
The following objectives, according to Barlaz,are designed to: comprehensively understand and explain why some landfills experience elevated temperatures and develop and validate a methodology to predict temperatures in landfills over time.
Findings will be available to the industry, regulators, engineering community and interested public via meetings, white paper reports, journal articles and regularly scheduled webinars, according to the EREF’s press release.
