Granada: Monitoring the environmental impact of landfills

Development opportunity

Researchers at the University of Granada in Spain have developed an objective, standardised method for assessing the environmental impact of landfill sites and have tested the method, called EVIAVE, in landfills in Chile, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela.

The tests have enabled the researchers to develop software to ease the implementation of the EVIAVE method.

The resulting system can adapt to different conditions in different places, analysing the relationship between landfill dynamics and their influence on environmental pollution. It is likely to be particularly useful in monitoring the environmental impact of unlicensed landfill sites, where there has been no control over what, or how much, has been dumped, and where the site may present a danger of polluting ground water or river systems.

EVIAVE, which has now been applied and validated in landfills in Andalusia, incorporates a set of standardised indexes that quantify the environmental impact of landfills – Environment-Landfill Interaction Index; Environmental Risk Index, Environmental Value Index; and Probability of Contamination Index.

Starting from the basic EVIAVE methodology, researchers from the Department of Computing Sciences and Artificial Intelligence have written software that makes implementation easier. This tool also provides more complete information about the environmental impact and reduces subjectivity and uncertainty that can arise when the method is applied by experts from different fields, according to one of the researchers, Garrido Vegara.

The technique, says the university, complies with the European Union’s standards for non-hazardous waste landfills set out in EU Directive 31/99/EEC.