Assessment of Groundwater Contamination in Municipal Solid Waste Landfill nearby Small Settlements

Abstract

European North with a low population density and poorly developed transport infrastructure, it is difficult to organize waste removal and storage at large landfills, therefore many settlements have small landfills of municipal solid waste (MSW), and the practice of placing them in marshes is very common, which leads to the migration of pollutants into adjacent water bodies. Systematic monitoring of the environmental in the vicinity of such landfills is hampered by high costs of periodic water sampling and chemical composition analyses. It is possible to decrease the number of substances under analysis and thus reduce costs by determining the marker substances, the concentration of which in groundwater near the landfill has stable correlations with the content of other pollutants. The article provides results of cluster analysis made it possible to identify marker substances. To assess the extent of groundwater contamination at landfills of the Arkhangelsk region monitoring of solid waste landfills was organized, which included sampling and studying the chemical composition of the samples. The results of the study have shown that the dependences obtained are applicable for a large landfill in the capital of the region – the City of Arkhangelsk, while for landfills in small settlements the dependences need to be adjusted.