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In Europe, a Council Directive passed in 1999 provided for the regulation of waste disposal in landfills. This was a specific piece of legislation aimed at environmental control of new and currently operational installations. As a result, it has become necessary to adapt currently operational release points to make them compatible with the new legislation. This new situation has obliged the different environmental organisations to carry out a stocktaking of release points in order to draw up a conditioning plan or a closing plan in accordance with the directive. The present study describes a new methodology by which environmental diagnosis of landfill sites may be carried out, involving the formulation of environmental indexes that give information about the potential environmental problems of currently operational landfills. The indexes provide information related to the location, design and operation in order to help draw up action plans for the conditioning or closure of the landfill site and to prioritise the order of actions required.

The lack of modern and realistic waste management policies in Venezuela has led to uncontrolled waste dumping at landfills. Such landfills generate serious problems because of their location, design, and exploitation. Given this adverse state of affairs, it seems surprising that so little effort has been made to carry out an environmental diagnosis of landfill sites. The few existing studies have merely made inventories of waste disposal sites, and have limited themselves to pointing out the obvious, namely, the negative impact of such installations on the environment without determining cause-effect relations and without developing tools for defining strategic actions to solve this problem. The study presented in this paper uses EVIAVE, a method of environmental diagnosis developed by researchers at the University of Granada, to diagnose landfills in Venezuela. It was necessary to modify EVIAVE in order to adapt the method to the legal system and social context in Venezuela. The data obtained, after applying methodology to 22 landfills in the country, include a series of environmental indexes (Environment Landfill Index, Environmental Risk Index, Environmental Value Index and Probability of Contamination Index) which allowed us to quantify the relation of landfill dynamics and its influence on various environmental elements. The results of the study confirm that EVIAVE can be successfully used as a planning tool for strategic actions that will reduce the environmental impact produced by indiscriminate waste disposal.

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