Processes, mechanics and management of wastes

Waste management is changing rapidly as the need to manage the earth's resources responsibly becomes increasingly accepted and enshrined in new legislation. Ideally, changes to the law, regulation and practice would be science-led; but in such a dynamic environment, scientific understanding and engineering know-how sometimes struggle to provide support with the result that the potential consequences of legislative and financial drivers for change may not be fully thought-through. For example, the EU Landfill Directive was enacted mainly to reduce fugitive greenhouse gas emissions from landfills, but its implementation with current treatment options could have the opposite effect. The aim of the Platform Grant is to provide the University of Southampton Waste Management Research Group with the stability and flexibility needed to explore new directions for its research that will provide the waste industry with the science and engineering needed for sustainable response to financial, regulatory and social drivers, and will address the legacy of unsolved problems arising from previous waste management practices. Key areas for development are:1) Field scale implementation of current research - enabling a rapid response when suitable study sites arise: We have developed the science needed by industry to reduce the long term pollution liability of landfills by a variety of remediation techniques, including flushing and in situ aerobic treatment. While excellent progress has been made, major uncertainties remain in upscaling from the laboratory to the field. This will be addressed in future research, in which we plan to investigate flushing and aeration at the field scale by running trials within discrete, bounded areas of MSW landfill(s) with the aim of significantly reducing the long term polluting potential of the wastes. 2) Resource recovery - second generation bio-based products and energy carriers from organic wastes and post-landfill processing: Government policy and strategic waste planning has highlighted a vital role for energy and commodity grade resource recovery in UK waste management practice. The infrastructure to facilitate this is already taking shape, through source segregated collection systems, growing markets for recovered products and pricing structures (e.g. ROC and feed-in tariffs) to encourage renewable energy production. The technology, however, is still in its infancy and underpinning research is urgently needed to support process engineering design, adapt existing technologies and exploit the potential for using waste as a raw material for biorefineries and solid recovered fuels. This will be done within an overall energy, materials and product recovery framework to include MSW processing operations where source segregation is not practised and also post-land filled wastes to reduce their long-term pollution potential and to create additional void space. 3) Application of recent and ongoing research to new forms of wastes - identifying key synergies: There is immense potential for translating the results of our current research into new areas, in particular in characterisation and near field contaminant transport modelling of low and very low level radioactive wastes.4) Development/promotion of a Sustainable Waste/Resource Management Forum including decision support systems (DSS - establishing expertise and stakeholder engagement, and maximising impact: DSS will make the results of the Group's research more readily available to users, encouraging knowledge transfer and maximising impact. Little work has been done to develop DSS for the waste industry, although the potential benefits have been recognised by some. DSS will also facilitate policy and operational decisions on the complex technology and process options available

The WMRG is internationally recognised for its highly successful research programmes and the associated outreach and dissemination activities. A major factor in this has been the continuity of employment of its senior research staff, allowing them to engage with industry, regulators and government on waste and resource management topics. The Platform Grant will thus contribute significantly to the future of the waste management industry by providing a wide range of beneficiaries with continuing access to new knowledge. One aim of the proposal is to consolidate the knowledge now contained in our databases, models, documented experience and methods into more formalised decision support systems (DSS). This will have major impact by allowing the industry, including regulators and consultants involved in design and government departments responsible for policy and strategy, to access information in a much simpler and more user-friendly manner. The DSS concept extends across the topics considered in the application, but in the case of landfill aftercare a full DSS should be realised within the lifetime of the grant. This will provide a comprehensive analysis which, taken in combination with field scale remediation trials, will give improved confidence in aftercare provision and allow implementation of cost-effective management systems. Impacts will range from providing information to communities local to old landfill sites to giving site owners data on achievable and cost-effective engineering solutions, and planners a basis for the assessment of long-term economic and societal costs. More widely, current and future waste management options will be analysed using a range of LCA tools, allowing benchmarking and further development while providing improved datasets and reporting methods. The impact of this will be that Local Authorities and regional planners who are increasing called upon to consider ever more complex waste management treatment and recovery options, will have enhanced LCA toolkits that allow them to make decisions on process and management options in a consistent and transparent manner. The WMRG has helped to bring about the conceptual shift from waste to resource management, and the research will extend this by considering new approaches for enhanced materials and energy recovery from both fresh wastes and old landfills. This has positive impacts on natural resource sustainability, and on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprints through energy substitution. Maximising benefits from the readily biodegradable fraction of waste is a key element of the work: development of sustainable nutrient cycles linking urban consumption to agricultural needs will play a major role in reducing environmental damage, while supporting the rural economy. As well as being carbon neutral energy sources, these biodegradable wastes can be used as feedstocks for second generation bio-based products, decreasing our reliance on oil and creating business development opportunities. We will also explore the prospects for resource recovery from waste already deposited in landfill sites, providing opportunities for the waste industry to diversity while freeing up airspace for re-use, to the benefit of local and regional planners. Research on containment systems has opened up new perspectives on the safety of some historic disposal sites, and tracer tests in landfills have provided baseline data for modelling the release and transport of contaminants. This knowledge could have a high impact on future policy and practice in the nuclear industry as it addresses the disposal of growing quantities of Low and Very Low Level radioactive waste. Transfer of our knowledge on soil-water interactions and our landfill modelling experience can contribute significantly to decision-making on sites for disposal of the 1.8 Mtonnes of VLLW expected from decommissioning of nuclear installations over the next few decades.