Landfill Mining in Latvia

Status, Problems and Challenges

Abstract

A lot of efforts and scientific research have been done in the field of material and energy recovery from waste, offering source separation and recycling of waste, landfill gas extraction from landfill cells, composting of biodegradable waste etc. Nevertheless, disposal of waste in dumpsites and landfills has been and still is the most widely used waste management method throughout the world, including Latvia. In recent years a concept of a landfill as an endpoint of waste is slowly changing to a concept of landfill as a place for temporary storage of waste. According to Hogland et.al., there are up to 500 000 landfills and dumpsites in Europe, that contain valuable resources which can be recovered and used in production of new products.

Since implementation of the Council Directive of April 26, 1999 on the landfill of waste, more than 500 dumpsites have been closed and 11 new sanitary landfills have started operating in Latvia. Largest part of the dumpsites are remediated, however the rest are still waiting for remediation projects. During the last twenty years practical examples of waste excavation from dumpsites and landfills have been carried out, showing that resource recovery from deposited waste can be a solution, especially in the cases of high land value or scarcity of covering materials. The aim of the paper is to assess the existing status of non-remediated dumpsites to identify the problems and challenges potentially faced for conducting the landfill mining projects in Latvia, as well as to show the existing practice on landfill mining in our country. The results of the paper show that some of the most challenging problems are issues of the ownership of dumpsites, the unknown content of the waste deposited, the lack of appropriate treatment technologies for excavated waste, as well as the lack of legislative acts concerning landfill mining and land use after cleaning of dump site. The case of excavating dumpsite ‘Kekava’ near Riga city is analyzed in the paper.