This is news which we thought we would pass on to any readers follwoing this case. Discharge of leachate into wells is not normally acceptable, however, it is hoped that the decision was made on the basis of good science and not "knee jerk" environmental sentiment from the "Green " lobby. After reading the excerpt from the orginal article below, please visit the original site. You can use the link provided after the article.
MAYFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Officials say plans to allow landfill leachate in a Grand Traverse County injection well are being dropped.
The Traverse City Record-Eagle reports Friday (http://bit.ly/Jyd2Kk ) that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials recently informed Mayfield Township leaders that a company involved withdrew its application. The owners of the Weber Well had sought in recent years to reclassify the well. Plans for the change at the well had been opposed by some residents and local governments.
The leachate would have come from Glen's Landfill in Leelanau County. The well is located about six miles west of Kingsley. Information from: Traverse City Record-Eagle,
The Manawatu Standard, New Zealand has reported problems with leachate which are being remedied by the authorities concerned. There is no discussion of how the problem arose. Lined landfills will always tend to leak and leachate will very often be formed when desk-based calculation might show otherwise.
That's why regular leachate level monitoring is usually a requirement for all closed landfills, even when leachate is being removed as it apparently was in this case.
The purpose of monitoring is to check that leachate is not building up in some parts of the landfill. Clearly, when leachate levels rise there is much more risk of a leak out of the landfill liner containment system, occurring.
We have included much of the original article below, but we would appreciate it if you would also please visit the original site for the full story:
Steps have been taken to stem the flow of toxic leachate from the Awapuni landfill in Palmerston North.
In May it was revealed that leachate from the landfill had been seeping into the Mangaone Stream and on into the Manawatu River.
Leachate from the lined landfill is collected and taken to the city's wastewater treatment plant.
An independent groundwater scientist and a landfill specialist were contracted to compile a report containing information about what was in the landfill, when material was dumped there, the landfill design and the leachate collection, treatment and discharge system. The original unlined landfill started operating in 1951 and was operational until 1995 when it was replaced by a lined extension, which was used until 2007.
Science and water quality manager Jon Royguard said that more surface water sampling had been completed at 15 sites in the vicinity of the landfill during two low-flow periods.
A further set of samples of the leachate and some other key locations has also been completed in late May. The results of this additional work will be written up in a separate follow-up document that is likely to be available in July.
Testing is continuing around the Higgins site and Mangaone Stream.
Dr Royguard said Palmerston North City Council put in place work to remedy the leaking.
"We have advised them of some remedial action and they have got to it very quickly."
The final report will be made public in August.
A few years ago it would have been rare to hear of Waste Diversion from Landfill as a driver for the implementation of waste treatment fa...
Read about this new project start for a US MSW Anaerobic Digestion Plant. No! I did say that this is all about a project in the US! This sounds more like the type of AD Plant favoured in Europe and previously would nto have been seen in the US.
Anaerobic Digestion News: Planned UK Conference to Address H&S Issues Posed ...: Is the advent of more biogas plants , with the inevitable exposure of the workforce to biogas explosion risks, on the brink of causing accidents at Anaerobic Digestion Plants... Follow the link above to find out more about the risks and a forthcoming UK conference on the subject.
A large UK WASTE company has been accused of polluting water supplies in a North East town (and that this was, it is alleged, somehow by allowing leachate to enter the groundwater), is set to face trial. Residents were disappointed about the slow progress of the action, with the lawyers and Biffa going away to prepare their cases.
Unfortunately, if leachate has entered the groundwater, it will be there of a very long time. We have taken an excerpt form the orginal article and included it as a quotation below. For the full article please make a point of visiting the original web site via he linik at the bottom of the article:
Biffa Waste Services Ltd, which runs a waste management site at Houghton-le-Spring, is being prosecuted by the Environment Agency for six alleged water contamination offences which are said to have occurred between 2010 and 2011.
Charges facing the company include allowing leachate – a foul-smelling liquid which runs from rubbish – into the water supply, knowingly breaking the conditions of their Environmental Permit and failing to inform the Environment Agency of the breaches.
The water supply serves thousands of homes in Sunderland and County Durham.
Protestors involved in the Residents Against Toxic Site (RATS) group, who have campaigned against the landfill site for 15 years, were at Sunderland Magistrates’ Court yesterday for the latest brief hearing in the case.
Colin Wakefield, an independent councillor for the Copt Hill ward and chairman of RATS, said the campaigners support the prosecution.
The group were hoping to see immediate progress but instead the case was adjourned until September, when the matter has been listed for trial.
However no pleas have yet been entered by Biffa Waste Services, and it is understood the case could still be resolved outside of court.
Biffa Waste Services is one of the biggest waste management companies in the UK and runs the Houghton-le-Spring landfill from a former quarry.
It deals with 500,000 tonnes of waste a year and the organisation is currently in the process of asking for planning permission to continue operating for another 17 years.
It lies less than a mile from Stonegate pumping station in Houghton-le-Spring which supplies water to people living in South Sunderland, Houghton-le-Spring and South Durham.
Niall Carlin, prosecuting on behalf of the Environment Agency, said at an earlier hearing: “The case has a great deal of public importance as it relates to allegations of contamination of water supplying the citizens of Sunderland.”
Biffa Waste Services are charged with breaching their Environmental Permit; failure to inform the Environment Agency of the breach; allowing pollution of ground water to occur; not taking measures to prevent leachate emissions causing pollution; exceeding acceptable levels of leachate; and exceeding danger levels for ground water.
Good news about the leachate management at the Cherokee Nation landfill. In a recent article it was announced that Tribe’s landfill may still have some issues, as far as the residents are concerned, but it is being operated better. In particular, a leachate pond used to catch water that leached from waste dumped at the Cherokee Nation landfill near Cherokee Tree, Okla., is no longer used and should be phased out soon. Read the full except below. Then take a look at the orignal article using the link provided below the article:
Three years ago, the Cherokee Nation’s landfill in Adair County was in the process of re-opening after facing regulatory issues two years before. The landfill closed in 2008, and its operator, Indian Country Investments, was fined more than $1 million by the CN Environmental Protection Commission for environmental violations, including leakage from an unlined storage pond, excessive methane gas levels and failing to adequately cover refuse with soil.
In July 2009, the landfill re-opened under Cherokee Nation Waste Management and has been under CNWM’s care since.CN Environmental Programs Administrator Tom Elkins said CNWM monitors the landfill to ensure its compliance with CN environmental regulations. He said the landfill still deals with issues, but is operating much better.
Elkins said one issue is an unused leachate pond. Leachate is water that has run over or through trash. He said tanks capture the leachate but the pond now collects rainwater, sometimes to its capacity.He said CNWM wants to close out the pond, but to do so would require removing “millions” of gallons of leachate from the pond and shipping it to nearby Stilwell to be processed, which isn’t cost feasible. Elkins said the tribe’s EPC has informed CNWM that it needs to address the pond’s needs and pump out the leachate water. He said the EPC has instructed him to have a violation notice ready for the commission’s June meeting in case CNWM has not addressed the pond’s problem. “It that doesn’t encourage them to do it, it will go into the next step of regulatory issues,” he said.The landfill, on average, takes in 100 tons of trash a day, Elkins said. “That’s really not much for a landfill. At one time, they took might have taken 1,800 tons (a day), which was probably more than they should have taken,” he said.The trash comes from throughout northeastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas. Another issue for the landfill has been trash, mainly plastic bags, blowing out of trash trucks. CNWM has installed “trash-catch fences” to keep bags from leaving the landfill property and blowing into neighboring properties.“It’s more of a housekeeping issue than it is a regulatory issue,”
Elkins said.He added that landfill workers also are assigned to pick up trash not caught by the fences. “It’s being taken care of a lot better than it was,” he said. A regulatory issue that has been addressed since CNWM began operating the landfill is uncovered trash. Trash dumped into the landfill must be covered daily by dirt.“It’s an issue we have to stay on top of. If you have uncovered trash, you start getting rats, birds…that spread disease. We can’t have that, so we’re on that tight about getting that covered up,” Elkins said. Despite its issues, the landfill is needed to prevent a potentially worse situation caused by illegal dumping on rural roads, Elkins said. Locals use illegal dumping sites or wildcat dumps when they no longer have a place to dump trash.Elkins said the last time the landfill stopped taking trash county commissioners in northeast Oklahoma informed tribal leaders that communities did not have a place to take their trash.
