Hunting for valuables from landfills and assessing their market opportunities A case study with Kudjape landfill in Estonia

Abstract

Landfill mining is an alternative technology that merges the ideas of material recycling and sustainable waste management. This paper reports a case study to estimate the value of landfilled materials and their respective market opportunities, based on a full-scale landfill mining project in Estonia. During the project, a dump site (Kudjape, Estonia) was excavated with the main objectives of extracting soil-like final cover material with the function of methane degradation. In total, about 57,777 m of waste was processed, particularly the uppermost 10-year layer of waste. Manual sorting was performed in four test pits to determine the detailed composition of wastes. 11,610 kg of waste was screened on site, resulting in fine (<40 mm) and coarse (>40 mm) fractions with the share of 54% and 46%, respectively. Some portion of the fine fraction was sieved further to obtain a very fine grained fraction of <10 mm and analyzed for its potential for metals recovery. The average chemical composition of the <10 mm soil-like fraction suggests that it offers opportunities for metal (Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn) extraction and recovery. The findings from this study highlight the importance of implementing best available site-specific technologies for on-site separation up to 10 mm grain size, and the importance of developing and implementing innovative extraction methods for materials recovery from soil-like fractions.

Physico-chemical characteristics of fine fraction materials from an old crystal glass dumpsite in Sweden

“…Tukey's multiple comparisons test showed that the differences among the three size categories were significant statistically. The results were in agreement with other studies that quantified CF as 46 ± 11% [28], MF as ranging between 21.8% and 31.4% [29] and FF (<24 mm) averaging 55% [30]. However, the results may differ from a number of other studies owing to different factors such as sampling procedure, selected particle size categorisation, waste type and waste age [19].…”

Landfill Mining: A Case Study Regarding Sampling, Processing and Characterization of Excavated Waste From an Austrian Landfill

“…However, the amount of fines (<10 mm) found in Halbenrain, 49%, is comparable to those found in Kuopio, Finland, with 50-54% (Kaartinen et al, 2013); Lower Austria, Austria, with 47% (Wolfsberger et al, 2015); and Remo, Belgium, with 44±12% (Quaghebeur et al, 2013). Regarding the amount of plastics (2D and 3D plastics), Halbenrain accounts for 16.5%, whereas the amount in Kuopio, Kudjape, Lower Austria and Remo are 23%, 22.4% (Bhatnagar et al, 2017), 18%, and 17±10%, respectively.…”

Characterization of Fine Fractions From Landfill Mining: A Review of Previous Investigations

“…However, under landfill conditions it is obvious that metals like Ca, Mg, K and Na, but also a significant proportion of Fe are present in oxidized form as minerals. Among these, Ca and Fe were the metals with higher concentration ranges, with 70,000-80,000 mg/kg and 30,000-50,000 mg/kg, respectively, in the fraction < 10 mm; followed by Mg, K, Na and Zn (concentrations between 500-20,000 mg/kg), Mn, Cu and Pb (concentrations around 150-400 mg/kg) and Cr, Ni, Co and Cd (concentrations below 150 mg/kg), according to Bhatnagar et al, 2017. A similar trend in terms of metal concentrations was found between all excavated pits .…”

“…Moreover, together the fractions < 0.425 mm and 0.425-6.3 mm constituted about 60 Particle size wt.% of the excavated landfill MSW (3-8 years old) by Jain et al, 2005; where 44.6 wt.% corresponded to the fraction < 0.425 mm and 14.5 wt.% to the fraction 0.425-6.3 mm. Excavated landfill MSW (10 years old waste), which consisted of around 54 wt.% material < 40 mm and about 46 wt.% material > 40 mm, exhibited a slight increase in the amount of the material < 40 mm with depth (Burlakovs, Kaczala et al, 2016;Bhatnagar et al, 2017). The results obtained by Kaartinen et al, 2013 indicated transport of the fraction < 20 mm (5-10 years old excavated MSW) towards the bottom layer of the landfill as well.…”