ISTEAC

Getting away from air pollution and the dumping of resources

When waste is landfilled, valuable materials are lost. This is an unsatisfactory situation from both an industrial and from an environmental point of view. Moreover, the landfilling of waste without proper care is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emmissions. The prevention of the environment from the negative effects of waste dumping is associated with an enourmous technical effort and huge costs. All these have been driving forces that EU-countries agreed on a landfill directive which orders the gradual reduction of the waste amounts sent to landfills. From 1st of June 2005, Germany prohibited all untreated waste with organic content to be landfilled as a consequence of which most of the country's landfills were closed and became the subject of sanitation and renaturation measures. During their study tour in Germany the ISTEAC participants visited a landfill site in Gröbern near Meissen which had stopped receiving waste in May 2005. At the site leachate collection and treatment station and the landfill gas collection system with power generator, both standard technologies on German landfill sites, were explained.

[Photos from closed landfills in the RAVON area]