Performance Indicators for Leachate Management: Municipal Solid Waste Landfills in Portugal

Abstract

The significant concern of leachate management refers essentially with water, groundwater, and soils pollution, determining the need of adequate treatment for discharged in water, soil, or wastewater collection networks. Leachate generation is an inevitable consequence of landfill waste disposal. An adequate landfill leachate collection and treatment allows proper environmental protection and prevention of surface water, groundwater, and soils contamination. It also minimises operational costs in the overall landfill management. The design and construction of leachate treatment plants strongly depends on the quality and quantity of the raw leachate, which in turn is influenced by numerous factors, including rainfall, waste composition, age of fill, landfill design and construction and operational procedures (Qasin e Chiang, 1994). A detailed knowledge of local leachate management and treatment allows the identification of specific setbacks and constrains that need resolution, on an operational management view as well as with legal decisions to be made for leachate treatment performance. In 2008, an assessment on the status of Portugal mainland’s Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfill leachate management was developed (Martinho et al., 2008, 2009). The main objectives of this study intended to (Martinho et al., 2009):  Evaluate current status on leachate generation and treatment in MSW landfills;  Develop and apply performance indicators and other relevant context information that enables benchmarking analysis, regarding leachate treatment plants;  Identify and determine constraints (i.e. environmental, operational, and economical) related to leachate generation and treatment on a national context and possible minimisation measures;  Identify practices and tendencies in the field of leachate treatment technologies mainly in other EU Member States, and application on a national basis. Performance indicators have been developed for water and wastewater services. (Alegre et al., 2004; Matos et al., 2004). The structure was designed to assess the performance of Management Entities (ME) that provide these services, in terms of their activities and intervention areas. Regarding waste management, Cunha and Simoes (2010) describe the existing performance indicators used by the Portuguese Water and Waste Regulatory