Why a Landfill Leachate Pollution Incident is so Dangerous to River and Stream Life

Leachate water pollution is a really serious problem when it takes place. I picture how major it is when nasty sewerage overflows in a city district. The encounter is not a pleasurable one for us human beings when we could quickly use our feet and move far from the contamination resource, but the plants and fauna that reside in waterways and streams have nowhere to go when pollution escapes into their living space underwater.

(Image: jschoen2000 via Flickr)

Now think about that landfill leachate which is (depending on the landfill it came from) between 10 and 100 times more powerful compared to sewerage, and take into consideration just how harmful that could be to all-natural organisms in our waterways and streamflows.

Throughout a leachate water pollution event the organic contamination in leachate which is represented by the concentration of BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) feeds micro-organisms in the water which take air from the water in order to increase. This means that there is little or no oxygen left for greater organisms such as fish to breath, and the initial result of leachate water air pollution is generally that witnesses observe lifeless fish belly-up on the edge of the stream or drifting in the direction of the flow.

Nevertheless, when this occurs you can wager that a whole host of undetected creatures that would generally support the life of the fish are likewise suffering and dying. The result is that the whole ecological balance of the watercourse is hindered and could take lots of months, or years, to recover to its initial clean and living and population booming normal condition.

However, aside from the effect of minimized oxygen levels which we have explained, leachate includes numerous other contaminants. The hardest to get rid of and most damaging to flows and river it might enter into is ammoniacal-nitrogen. (People have frequently called this ammonia, yet ammonia in water is a mix of liquefied ammonium and gaseous ammonia - so we will certainly call it ammoniacal-nitrogen to make it clear that we called the complete ammonia (gas) and ammonium (dissolved)).

Ammoniacal-nitrogen is typically existing in sewerage at in between 10 mg/l and FIFTY mg/l (10 ppm to 50 ppm), but in a controlled garbage dump leachate from a regular sanitary waste landfill it will certainly be found to be between 500 mg/l and 3,000 mg/l.

Now consider just what level of ammoniacal-nitrogen greater organisms could allow in typical pH neutral river and stream water, and it is about in the 5 mg/l to 50 mg/l range that they start to end up being stressed and would be likely to perish. From this it is logical to conclude that also an ordinary strength landfill leachate would have to be watered down at least 10 to 100 times prior to it comes to be benign from the perspective of ammoniacal-nitrogen.

So, leachate water contamination is a very seriously unsafe pollution to our waterways and flows, and it is beneficial for society to use up a great deal of care and money to avoid leachate water pollution happening.