ABSTRACT
To reduce the negative impact of leachate upon groundwater quality, municipal landfills are required to use a composite liner composed of a flexible plastic membrane underlain by a compacted soil layer. For small communities, the use of a composite liner to protect groundwater resources from leachate pollution may result in an excessive increase of the landfill cost, which may prevent these communities from adopting a municipal landfill as their solution for the solid waste management problem. Taking this into consideration, the objectives of this research are to study the amount of leachate generated into a landfill based upon some design considerations, as well as to study key parameters in landfill leachate production and the attenuation processes that could affect their fate on field scale aquifers. This is an ongoing research project and its final goal is to derive new regulations for landfills design based upon the new findings.
