Errors involved in the estimation of Leachate Pollution Index of solid waste landfill in Bangladesh

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2013 in the subject Environmental Sciences, , language: English, abstract: An important part of maintaining a solid waste landfill is managing the leachate through proper treatment methods designed to prevent pollution into surrounding ground and surface waters. Any assessment of the potential impact of a landfill on groundwater quality requires consideration of the components of the leachate most likely to causze an envionental impact as well as the source of concentration of those components. Leachate pollution index (LPI)is an environmental index used to quantify and compare the leachate contamination potential of solid waste landfill. This index is based on the concentration of 18 pollutants of the leachate and their corresponding significance. That means, for calculating the LPI of a landfill, concentration of these 18 parameters are to be known. However, sometimes the data for all the 18 pollutants included in the LPI may not be available to calculate the LPI. In this study, the possible errors involved in calculating the LPI due to the nonavailability of data are reported by the author. The leachate characteristic data for solid waste landfill at Chittagong in Bangladesh have been used to estimate these errors. Based on this study, it can be concluded that the errors may be high if the data for the pollutants having significantly high or low concentration are not available. However, LPI can be reported with a marginal error if the concentrations of the non available pollutants are not completely biased.