Landfill Closure

There is a science to closing a landfill.  At this stage of the landfill life-cycle, potentially explosive landfill gas production may be at its peak.  Differential settlement of wastes, including settlement as waste decompose, challenges the designer and closure contractor.  Thick soil caps and large concrete structures on top of waste materials often increase differential settlement, leading to failure of the closed landfill.

Since 1970, SCS has met the challenges of closing landfills through innovative cap and surface water drainage systems designed to account for differential settlement and landfill gas.  Services include:

• Closure Plans and Specifications for Third-Party Construction

• Construction Quality Assurance (CQA) and Engineering Oversight

• Closure Design-Build

• Innovative Closure Finance

• Landfill Reuse

   Landfill Post-Closure Care

Following closure, landfills require continued maintenance and monitoring as required by regulations and common sense.  Typical maintenance activities include care of the vegetative layer, repairs to landfill caps, stormwater structures, and gas protection systems.  Typical monitoring activities include those required for groundwater and landfill gas, in addition to routine inspections.

SCS is uniquely qualified to help clients with long-term post-closure care of landfills.  Services include:

• Groundwater Monitoring and Annual Reports

• Risk Assessments, Alternative Concentration Limits, and Corrective Action for Groundwater

• Landfill Gas Monitoring and Corrective Actions

• Cover Maintenance

• Cap and Stormwater Systems Repair

• Regulatory Compliance

• Innovative Finance for Post-closure Care

  Site Reuse: Landfills as Brownfields

Landfills can be appropriate sites for real estate development.  Often located near major transportation routes, many older landfills are located in growing urban or suburban population centers, where demand for real estate is high.  

Landfills have been successfully developed as sites for a variety of land uses:

• Regional Malls and Big Box Retail

• Office and Light Industrial Parks

• Hotels and High Rise Commercial 

• Government Centers, Jails, Animal Shelters, Maintenance Facilities, Greenhouses

• Parks, including Golf Courses, Ball Fields, Amphitheaters, Firing Ranges

• Residential, Including Single Family and Multifamily Housing

There are many challenges to reusing a closed landfill site.  Liability considerations (Superfund, toxic torts) and technical problems (settlement, gas, health and safety) abound.  But just as a growing number of formerly-used industrial sites are being redeveloped for productive uses in what has become known as the "Brownfield" movement, so too have landfill sites been increasingly developed for high-value, productive land uses.

  SCS Engineers - Landfill Site Reuse Since 1970

Our first project in 1970, a month before the first Earth Day, was a project to reuse an old landfill.  Since then, SCS has performed hundreds of such projects.  We are not aware of any other firm in the world with more experience than SCS when it comes to reusing old landfill sites.

Our services include:

• Landfill Assessments to Determine Development Constraints (e.g., landfill gas migration potential, anticipated differential settlement, waste areas to avoid during excavations, etc.)

• Geotechnical Engineering for Foundations

• Alternative Isolation Strategies for Waste Materials (e.g. alternative cap systems)

• Landfill gas protection system design and construction

• Technical Negotiations with Regulatory Agencies and Permit Issues

• Long-term Operations, Maintenance, and Monitoring of Protection Systems