AREA A/B ENGINEERING REPORT - Waste Management

5.1 Why Monitor for Potential Releases from a Landfill to the Environment?
Active
Environmental Monitoring
Geosyntec Consultants
By understanding the manner in which environmental media can potentially be impacted by a
landfill, the environmental performance of a landfill can be monitored and potential upsets
avoided or, where environmental performance monitoring data indicate an upset may have
occurred, necessary response actions can be implemented expeditiously. Monitoring data can
also allow prediction of future landfill performance based on trends in past and current data. 21
The predictive element of landfill performance is particularly important in order to understand the
level of active landfill management and care necessary over the long term.
5.2 Components of an Environmental Monitoring Program
Subtitle D requires an EMP be designed to detect a
potential landfill upset involving leachate or
LFG. The monitoring programs
employed at the modern managed
landfill closely network together and
include monitoring systems for both
operational performance and
environmental media. As previously
introduced in Section 1.3, the principal
EMP components are summarized as follows:
• Groundwater monitoring;
• Surface water monitoring;
Subtitle D requires specific monitoring systems and
activities to provide early detection of a landfill
system component upset. These systems provide
environmental safeguards to provide long-term
protection of HHE.
• Lateral gas migration monitoring in the shallow unsaturated subsurface vadose zone;
• Surface emissions monitoring to detect and evaluate migration of methane through the
surface of the cover system to impact ambient air; and
• Monitoring the performance of operational control systems, including:
o Head-on-liner monitoring (i.e., the amount of liquid build-up on the base liner
system);
o Monitoring leachate characteristics and the leachate management system (LMS);
and,
o Monitoring LFG characteristics and the gas management system (GMS).
Although the principal objective of the EMP is to protect human health and the environment, each
individual EMP collects various types of monitoring data that together provide environmental
21 Numerous publications describe the manner in which environmental media can potentially be impacted by landfills
and methods for developing appropriate monitoring programs, including the USEPA’s “Solid Waste Disposal Facility
Criteria: Technical Manual” for Subtitle D landfills (Nov. 1993, rev. Apr. 1998). Additional seminal references include
NRC (1984), USEPA (1990a+b and 1993b), Gibbons & Coleman (2001), and ASTM (2004) for groundwater;
USEPA (2000) for surface water; IAEA (1992), IWM (1998), Trégourès, et al (1999), and Babilotte, et al (2008) for
LFG system performance and emissions to air; and USEPA (1993c) and DOE (2001) for vadose zone.
MD10186.doc 69 29 March 2009