| Closing the Circle: Enhanced Landfill Mining (Waste Management World, March-April 2011, 47-49) |
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Leuven, 25 juni 2011. Dit artikel over het ambitieuze concept Enhanced Landfill Mining verscheen in het vakblad Waste Management World (April-Maart 2011, 47-49). De auteurs zijn allen kernlid van het Vlaamse Enhanced Landfill Mining Consortium. ELFM maakt deel uit van de ruimere transitie naar duurzaam materialenbeheer, een begrip dat nu eindelijk ook politiek-maatschappelijke aandacht krijgt. Er is echter nog een lange weg af te leggen om revolutionaire concepten als ELFM ook daadwerkelijk te implementeren. Meer info op: http://www.elfm-symposium.eu/) (ptj)
Landfill mining has been touted as a way to recover valuable materials discarded over the years. So how does Enhanced Landfill mining differ? The Flanders-based Enhanced Landfill Mining Consortium addresses the difference with a case study outlining the REMO landfill site in Belgium and potential energy recovery.
Over the last 50 years, waste management has undergone significant paradigm shifts. The first shift was the phasing out of uncontrolled landfilling. Since the 1980s, all landfills must comply with several regulations. A major drawback is that the aftercare period for a closed landfill is limited, and landfills also occupy enormous amounts of land. The next step in waste management policy, therefore, consisted of combining landfill practices with a Waste to Energy (WtE) approach. Under the Enhanced Waste Management (EWM) concept, prevention and re-use/recycling become even more important, while the idea of landfilling as ‘a final solution’ is discarded. Landfills can become part of EWM, provided they are considered as ‘temporary storage places awaiting further treatment’. Waste brought to new storage facilities must be mined after a fixed time, and the storage operation will be performed to make mining and valorisation as efficient as possible. The nonrecyclable fraction at that particular moment in time must be stored so that future mining is possible. Enhanced landfill mining (ELFM) is also applicable to old landfills to deal with the waste legacy of the past. Billions of tonnes of waste has already been stored in landfills worldwide. As recycling and energy technologies have rapidly improved (and continue to do so), and as prices of commodities and carbon emissions are steadily climbing, new opportunities are arising to reclaim the value stored in old landfills. This integrated approach makes ELFM part of the transition towards a fully closed loop material system. It must be clarified that the presented ELFM approach clearly differs from traditional landfill mining, where the mining is often limited to reclaiming methane, land and a few valuable metals. ...
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Authors
Patrick Laevers, Group Machiels -
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