WRG Arpley Landfill Passes 1/2 Million Tonnes of Leachate Treated

From the WRG Newsletter

During early 2008, WRG’s Arpley leachate treatment plant passed a total of 500,000m3 of leachate treated. Since it was commissioned in October 2001, the plant has been treating very strong leachates which routinely contain greater than 2000mg/l of ammoniacal-N, to standards which allow safe discharge of effluent into the River Mersey.

When WRG took over Arpley Landfill in the spring of 1999, leachate was not under control. Although heads of leachate on the liner were limited to a maximum depth of 1 metre, levels were typically 7 or 8 metres, and well out of compliance. A key part of site remediation was investment of more than £1 million in a dedicated pneumatic leachate collection system, to automatically manage leachate levels in nearly 100 boreholes. From the start of 2001 leachates then began to be tankered off-site for treatment, at rates of up to 10,000m3 per month.

This allowed detailed pilot-scale treatability trials to be carried out by Enviros, to enable an optimum treatment scheme to be developed, which would represent the largest load of contaminants to be treated at any landfill site in the UK. WRG were no stranger to leachate treatment. In 1994, working with Enviros, a large leachate treatment plant had previously been designed and commissioned at Buckden Landfill near to Huntingdon, where a discharge consent into the sensitive River Great Ouse demands that rainbow trout shall be unharmed after 96 hours exposure to the final effluent. That plant continues to perform well, nearly 15 years later.

The treatment process adopted at Arpley (Plate 1) includes aerobic biological treatment of up to 450m3 of leachate each day, in three identical large Sequencing Batch Reactors. The SBR process has been pioneered for leachate treatment by Enviros, and shown to provide very stable and robust treatment of the very high ammonia and COD values which characterise leachates from large landfills. Effluent from the SBRs then passes through a Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) process, which removes any remaining suspended solids. The treated leachate receives final “polishing” by passage through the root zone of extensive engineered reed beds, before being discharged safely into the River Mersey which flows beside the site.

WRG and Enviros worked closely with the Environment Agency to plan and implement the leachate treatment solution, and by 2004 leachate levels had been brought back into compliance with the site licence in every monitoring borehole. The plant remains a key part of controlled landfilling at Arpley, and continues to treat leachates at typical rates of 8,000 to 9,000 cubic metres per month.

Operation of all functions of the plant is completely automated. A programmable logic controller (PLC) provides maximum reliability, and the plant operator interfaces with this using a PC. Many dozens of failsafe systems, alarms, and telemetry links provide enormous security of operation. Experiences at Arpley have also formed the basis for many other large leachate treatment plants around the world. For example, Taman Beringin is a very large landfill located close to the centre of the city of Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. Remediation of the site has included a new leachate treatment plant (see Plate 2). It achieves very high effluent quality standards, which allow discharge of treated leachate to be made into a nearby watercourse.

As environmental standards at landfill sites are raised around the world, the ability to treat leachates reliably, and to high standards, remains critical, and WRG and Enviros are presently designing several new plants that will be commissioned during 2009.

Enviros is a UK-based full-service environmental consultancy, with an international reputation in wastes management. In the specialised field of landfill leachate management, the company has unique expertise, having worked on every continent except Antarctica, and has designed and commissioned more than 80 full-scale
leachate treatment plants throughout the World.

Can Landfill Leachate be Treated by Anaerobic Digestion?

Every now and again the question of whether landfill leachate can be effectively treated by Anaerobic Digestion is raised.

My reply is yes, and in fact, it has already happened in the landfill before you usually see most leachate. After an initial aerobic (acetogenic) stage, modern landfills in effect become anaerobic digesters themselves. Once this has occurred the leachate produced has already been subjected to a form of anaerobic digestion, so there is little additional treatment which an AD Plant can provide to these mature leachates once leachate is removed from the landfill.

In a modern Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfill. as it is filled, each cell or area within it, will within 6 months to one year, or, at the most eighteen months, not only become airless, but methanogenic (methane producing). Once this happens, the decomposition process taking place in the landfill is broadly similar to, but slower than, that which occurs in an anaerobic digester.

So, modern lined and well regulated landfills these days do, almost without exception, produce a mature methanogenic leachate.

As a result the use of Anaerobic Digestion to treat landfill leachate is not normally a good choice and the use of the Anaerobic Digestion process to treat landfill leachate is not very effective. This can be readily deduced just by thinking about the processes which leachate undergoes within a landfill. The big problem with using AD on a mature leachate would be the lack of significant reduction of ammoniacal nitrogen in the discharge, and ammoniacal nitrogen is one of the most important contaminants to remove, for reduced toxity to water life.

However, the opposite does work. Now think of using aerobic reactors to treat Anaerobic Digestion concentrates, if these concentrates cannot for any reason be disposed as a fertiliser product and thus have to be treated as a waste material.

So, leachate treatment plant aerobic biological reactors can be used very effectively to treat AD liquid digestate, if that "product" ends up proving to be unsaleable locally. Indeed, on site aerobic digestate treatment might be essential in these circumstances if no sewage treatment works was available to accept tanker loads of liquid from an AD Plant.

UK PreBudget Items of Interest to the Landfill and Leachate Comunity

Waste@Westminster News

CHANCELLOR ISSUES PRE-BUDGET REPORT

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling MP, has issued the pre-budget report for 2009, emphasising the Government’s desire not to let the current economic downturn impact on spending on renewable energy and other environmental projects.

“Action to achieve environmental goals remains a high priority,” he stated in his address to Parliament. Of key importance, the pre-budget report states the Renewables Obligation will be extended until “at least 2037”, in order to encourage increased investment in renewable energy technologies.

In addition the report reaffirms the Government’s aim to implement a feed in tariff for small-scale energy generation (under 5MW) and a renewable heat incentive to encourage more on site generation. Furthermore a new Low Carbon Industrial Strategy will be developed in 2009, outlining a vision of how companies can take advantage of a “low-carbon economy”.

The report also confirms that the scheduled increases in landfill tax, by £8 per tonne up to 2010/11 will go ahead and indeed will continue post-2011.

The increase in the lower rate of landfill tax, applying to inactive waste, from £2 per tonne to £2.50 (to be frozen at £2.50 in 2009/10) will also stay unchanged, as will the planned phase-out of the exemption from landfill tax for waste arising from the clean up of contaminated land by 2012 (in order to extend land remediation relief).

Finally, as previously announced, a new packaging strategy will be produced in 2009 setting out how packaging policy can contribute to a low carbon economy by reducing waste at source and increasing recycling.

To read the Chancellor’s statement to Parliament in full click here, or to read the full chapter, delivering on environmental goals, click here.

Enviros Queried - Can You Treat Our Leachate?

In the past few weeks we have recieved a series of enquiries from landfill operators and water treatment plant contractors/operators, and they have raised a common question, which made us think it worth discussing here.

That recurring question is:

Can You Treat Our Leachate?

and, this is followed by, a comment suggesting that even if we design a plant it might not work.

These enquirers say things like:

We cannot afford to appoint you and for your plant not to work.

After further discussion we have been finding that they have been promised a working leachate treatment plant by an otherwise apparently competent water treatment engineer/ contactor/ operator, and it simply has not worked. By "not worked" this usually means that in some important water quality parameter the plant has failed to treat the substance sufficiently to meet the regulatory requirement.

This is truly a strange concept to us, that anyone offering to design a water treatment process, or any other process for that matter, spends the Client's money and builds a plant, and then is unable to get the plant to work and walks away.

In any other industry the perpetrators of such a debacle would surely have been "run out of town" by now! Or else the lawyers would be involved.

We would just like to say to our readers the following:-

We have only experienced less than half a dozen landfills around the world in the last 20 years which were not treatable by biological methods.

When we find a landfill leachate which we think is unusual and may be hard to treat, we will always carry out a simple treatability trial pilot study to test for the viability of biological treatment using a represetative sample of that leachate, before we commit to treatment.

If in the rare event we were unable to assure ourselves and all involved that we would be able to treat, we would not go forward into the construction stage. (However, we do have about 80 leachate plants to our designs working currently numbering the largest and most difficult anywhere.)

When the waste (which I am assuming will be a primarily Municipal Solid Waste) contains heavy metals high salinity etc, the biomass may take longer to acclimatise, but almost always will become established.

I will mention salinity again, because it brings us to another feature of these enquiries, and that is that many of these sites have RO Plants installed.

If the salt content would be above the maximum watercourse discharge concentration after biological treatment, we would consider installing an RO Plant, but only after biological treatment for any permanent installation.

Reverse Osmosis seldom makes sense as a main "treatment method" for landfill leachates, because biological treatment is normally cheaper than RO and importantly it does actually treat the waste.

Reverse Osmosis does not "treat" anything in the sense of coverting a contaminant from a toxic or damaging form to another chemical form, which is less so or even completely harmless, in the way biological treatment does.

We have been solving these problems for clients for the past 20 years or so, and our successful track record speaks for us.

So, if you are considering approaching the Enviros leachate team to ask us to assist with your project, please be assured that we are not in the business of providing plants that do not work!

CIWM's Next Leachate Monitoring Course

Training Course Details

26 Nov 2008

Course Title: Leachate Monitoring

One day (non-residential) course

Location: Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK

Are you involved in the monitoring or the control of leachate from landfills?

Do you really understand what leachate is and how to effectively monitor it?

This course will provide an understanding of what leachate is, its composition, and appropriate monitoring requirements.

Course includes practical demonstrations of using a range of equipment.

The course will also provide an introduction to the treatment of leachate.

What’s in it for me?

By the end of the course you will be able to:
• Explain the basic principles of leachate generation
• Identify key contaminants and their risks
• Explain the requirements of monitoring programmes and their objectives
• Know what current technical guidance documents are available
• Use the data generated to identify problems to ensure appropriate actions can be determined
• Identify a range of monitoring equipment and understand how they are to be used
• Explain some typical leachate treatment systems and be aware of the monitoring requirements of them.

Who is it for?
Technical staff working in landfill site operations, or design and regulation, with day to day responsibility for the monitoring of leachate generated by landfills or the monitoring of leachate treatment facilities.

CPD Hours: 6 Hours
SET Days: 1 Day

Register at the CIWM's Web Site.

Malaysian Government Acts to Control Leachate Pollution

Leachate has been a highly charged subject in Malaysia over the past few years with escaping leachate getting into rivers and from there into water supplies and imparting a bad taste into drinking water in many thousands of homes. So now the Malaysian government is doing something about it. as in the snippet of news below.

Government to manage landfills to arrest pollution

SUNGKAI: The Government will take over management of the country’s 260 landfills in a move to reduce river pollution by leachate from the dumpsites.

Housing and Local Government Minister Datuk Seri Ong Ka Chuan said the takeover, expected by September, would be conducted under the Solid Waste and Public Cleansing Management Act 2007.

At present, he said, the management of landfills was not properly carried out and this led to pollution by leachate from dumpsites.

“The current practice is that the councils will dump all collected rubbish at landfills without separating them,” he said yesterday.

“This will lead to leachate, resulting in pollution to nearby rivers.”

Ong assured the people that the takeover of solid waste management would not result in higher assessment rates.

“Everything will still be the same,” he said, adding that the move would not affect the council’s bottom line. More...

We have designed two leachate plants in Malaysia to begin to tackle this problem. Watch the video of one of these on the leachate web site homepage.

Last Chance to Book for Leachate Monitoring Course

The next Chartered Institution of Waste Management (UK) Leachate Monitoring course is on 25 Jun 2008, so if you act today there is just about time to register.

This is a One day (non-residential) course held in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK.

If you are you involved in the monitoring or the control of leachate from landfills this will be useful to you.

Do you really understand what leachate is and how to effectively monitor it?

This course will provide an understanding of what leachate is, its composition, and appropriate monitoring requirements you should implement.

The course includes practical demonstrations of using a range of leachate sampling and testing equipment.

The course will also provide an introduction to the treatment of leachate.

What’s in it for me?

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Explain the basic principles of leachate generation
• Identify key contaminants and their risks
• Explain the requirements of monitoring programmes and their objectives
• Identify the range of monitoring equipment used during leachate monitoring and understand how they are used
• Know what current technical guidance documents are available
• Know how to interpret the data generated in order to identify problems and ensure appropriate actions can be determined and taken
• Explain some typical leachate treatment systems and be aware of the monitoring requirements of them.

Who is it for?

Technical staff working in landfill site operations, or design and regulation, with day to day responsibility for the monitoring of leachate generated by landfills or the monitoring of leachate treatment facilities.

Your Leachate News Blogmaster Steve Last will be tutor for the sessions on, "What is Leachate?" and "Leachate Treatment".

For more information, and booking, visit the CIWM web site Leachate Monitoring Course page.