Nearly 2,000 active landfills are scattered across the U.S., with the majority of garbage thrown away by households and businesses finding their way to a landfill. The chemicals and toxins that come from these sites can dissolve into the soil and groundwater, and this “leachate” can pose serious dangers to the environment and to the people who live nearby.
To help environmental groups fight the toxic dangers posed by landfills, researchers at the University of Missouri – in partnership with the USDA Forest Service – have developed a system that runs the toxins that is present in landfills with toxic order and size, allowing organizations to create more specific and effective plans to combat leachate.
Leachate from landfills can cause cancer and other serious damage, and is a risk of being swallowed, ingested or rubbed. This is the first time a system has been created that automatically prioritises pollutants released from a landfill based on their toxicity and abundance. “
Chung-Ho Lin, Associate Research Professor, MU Center for Agroforestry, College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources
The system relies on an algorithm created by Elizabeth Rogers, a doctoral student working under the guidance of Lin at the University of Missouri and a USDA Path Worker. Rogers drew from a previous system designed to prioritize chemicals in “fracking” wastewater and modified it to be applied to landfill pollution.
Combining the algorithm with three “toxic databases” that are referenced when analyzing a sample from a landfill, the system adopts a traditional time-consuming process – identifying contaminating and determining the abundance and potential damage – and normalizing it. The result is a system of prioritization that can rank pollutants by taking into account both their toxicity and frequency at a particular site. In addition, pollutant prioritization can be easily customized based on factors and objectives that may vary from site to site.
Ronald Zalesny Jr., a study plant geneticist for the USDA Forest Service who also advises Rogers, worked with Lin and Rogers on the study making the best use of the prioritization and analysis system its convenience. For him, the ability to easily identify, measure and classify landfill pollutants meets a real need.
Tha Zalesny Jr. is the lead investigator for a project that uses trees to clean up contaminated soils and water at landfills. Through a natural process called phytoremediation, the poplar and willow trees help to reduce, absorb and prevent pollutants and the groundwater that carry them.
Knowing which pollutants are the most important targets in a particular place is crucial, Zalesny Jr. said, because different trees use different methods to remove pollutants from the soil, and it won’t work. one way for all kinds of pollutants.
“In the past, we have eliminated most of the most common pollutants, such as pesticides and pollutants from crude oil,” said Zalesny Jr. “Using this priority tool, we were now able to go to a fundamentally contaminated site, identify the main pollutants and match those contaminants with our trees to create a sustainable, long-term solution. to clean up pollution. “
The Zalesny Jr. project. as part of the Great Lakes Regeneration Initiative, which seeks to protect the Great Lakes from polluting the environment by providing relevant funding to federal agencies. If runoff from landfills makes its way into rivers and streams, it could eventually make its way into the Great Lakes, Zalesny Jr. said.
Rogers, who created the algorithm that can quickly classify pollutants with their toxicity, sees another important benefit to the system. Although many landfill regulations have not been updated in decades, new classes of pollutants are still coming to landfill, making it a problem for those who want to mitigate their impact. By providing scientists and researchers with up-to-date information on hundreds of potential pollutants, the priority system could help environmental groups deal with more of these dangerous newcomers. .
“Some of the potentially harmful fertilizers we mentioned using this scheme were from things like antibiotics or pharmaceuticals, which could adversely affect the human endocrine system,” Rogers said. ” There was also fertilizer from personal care products. And while we know that these new varieties can have a detrimental effect, there are many that we don’t know about, and they end up in landfills. this system will encourage further research into their effects. “
Source:
University of Missouri-Columbia
Magazine Reference:
Rogers, ER, et al. (2021) A systematic approach to prioritize toxic landfill pollutants: Applications and opportunities. Journal of Environmental Management. doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112031.