Chapter 18 - What do Recent Assessments Tell Us About the Potential and Challenges of Landfill Mining?

Abstract

Landfill mining has been proposed as a potential strategy to address unwanted impacts of waste deposits while simultaneously recovering deposited materials and energy resources. So far, however, the realization of such projects is rare, and the development of the area suffers from a general deficit in knowledge of how such projects could be executed in a cost-efficient and environmentally sound manner. For such emerging concepts, systems analysis could be useful for dimensioning potentials, assessing feasibility, and guiding knowledge development toward critical factors for implementation. During the recent years, quite a few assessments of landfill mining have been conducted but there is not yet any systematic synthesis of this body of knowledge. Therefore this study involves a review of 12 economic and environmental assessments. With the overall aim to provide guidance on essential future research topics, the chapter targets both the empirical findings and employed methodologies in the studies.