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A framework for assessment and characterisation of municipal solid waste landfill leachate: an application to the Turbhe landfill, Navi Mumbai, India

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Abstract

Rapid industrialisation, growing population and changing lifestyles are the root causes for the generation of huge amounts of solid waste in developing countries. In India, disposal of municipal solid waste (MSW) through open dumping is the most common waste disposal method. Unfortunately, leachate generation from landfill is high due to the prolonged and prominent monsoon season in India. As leachate generation rate is high in most of the tropical countries, long-term and extensive monitoring efforts are expected to evaluate actual environmental pollution potential due to leachate contamination. However, the leachate characterisation involves a comprehensive process, which has numerous shortcomings and uncertainties possibly due to the complex nature of landfilling process, heterogeneous waste characteristics, widely varying hydrologic conditions and selection of analytes. In order to develop a sustainable MSW management strategy for protecting the surface and ground water resources, particularly from MSW landfill leachate contamination, assessment and characterisation of leachate are necessary. Numerous studies have been conducted in the past to characterise leachate quality from various municipal landfills; unfortunately, none of these propose a framework or protocol. The present study proposes a generic framework for municipal landfill leachate assessment and characterisation. The proposed framework can be applied to design any type of landfill leachate quality monitoring programme and also to facilitate improved leachate treatment activities. A landfill site located at Turbhe, Navi Mumbai, India, which had not been investigated earlier, has been selected as a case study. The proposed framework has been demonstrated on the Turbhe landfill site which is a comparatively new and the only sanitary landfill in Navi Mumbai.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) for permitting collection of site data and leachate samples from Turbhe landfill site, Mumbai, India. We sincerely thank the editor and the four anonymous reviewers for reviewing the manuscript and providing us very insightful comments.

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  1. Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Harshit Mishra, Merwan Rathod & Subhankar Karmakar

  2. Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Subhankar Karmakar

  3. Centre for Urban Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Subhankar Karmakar

  4. National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI, Mumbai, 400018, India

    Rakesh Kumar

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Mishra, H., Rathod, M., Karmakar, S. et al. A framework for assessment and characterisation of municipal solid waste landfill leachate: an application to the Turbhe landfill, Navi Mumbai, India. Environ Monit Assess 188, 357 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-016-5356-6

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