Sustainable waste management is one of the largest environmental challenges facing big cities. Despite increasing requirements to recycle waste and recover materials and energy, landfill is still a major method of waste disposal. Landfills are complex systems where an understanding of geotechnics, microbiology and chemistry is required to appreciate the processes occurring. Stabilisation, which can take up to 100 years, involves settlement of the ground surface in response to the degradation of materials in the waste. The microbial activity in the landfill breaks down materials to soluble then gaseous end products. Understanding the processes and the factors that affect them is important for managing the rate of biodegradation and the time to stabilisation. This paper will report on data collected from five landfill sites in Hampshire, South of England, discussing behavior of "known" influencing factors in stabilisation process. Factors discussed in this paper are divided in two main categories a) site specific data including, geological, hydrogeological, topographical, waste type, clay liner type and engineering specifications and b) monitoring data including, COD, BOD, CH_4 Cl~-, N H_4, Rain Fall levels and etc. Comparative study carried out between these landfill site aims to identify distinctive behaviors and similarities in the stabilisation process.
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