Portuguese experience in construction of solid waste landfill liner systems

Abstract

An important effort has been made in Portugal during the last few years in order to change the waste management policy. Open dumps have been progressively closed whereas several new sanitary landfills have been constructed. ln this process, geosynthetics played an important role. However, the construction of appropriate liner systems for the new municipal solid waste landfills, and particularly the application of geosynthetics, required new geotechnical approaches in design and construction, which were, until recently, uncommon in Portugal. This paper focuses its attention on the preliminary experience collected from the use of geosynthetics and geomembranes in the construction of different Portuguese MSW landfills in recent years. The main design and construction requirements adopted, the legislation followed, the Construction Quality Assurance Plan prepared by National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (LNEC) and, finally, the main construction problems detected are reported in this paper.