METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTALLY AND ECONOMICALLY GROUNDED LAYOUT OF SOLID DOMESTIC WASTE POLYGON

Lisukho N.A, International Ecological University of A.D. Sakharov, Minsk; Yeroshina D.M, Byelorussian Research Center “Ecologiya”, Minsk, Belarus

For the last five years the rate of solid domestic waste formation that was specified in Republic of Belarus has been strongly increased. As compared to the year of 2000, the volume of solid domestic waste collected in 2005 exceeded 60% and amounted approximately to 3.2 million tons. Now, more than 95% of waste is buried within the area of solid domestic waste polygons.

Nowadays, approximately 200 polygons used for disposal of solid domestic waste are available in Belarus. With 56 polygons being inspected within the period of 1992 – 2005 by the experts of RUP “BelNITz “Ecologiya”, as well as according to the data of Waste Disposal and Neutralization Facility Public Register, it was found out that a number of the inspected polygons do not meet the current legal requirements with respect to waste disposal, handling and storage techniques. At majority of the facilities no environmental monitoring was held. Previously, when selecting any place required for waste facility arrangement, the matters of momentary operational cost saving were taken as of sufficient ground and, as a result, the very facilities were constructed close to settlements, even if they were arranged at any environmentally unfavorable areas.

Even, with the hygiene-and-sanitary and ecological requirements made to any solid domestic waste polygon to be followed, quite an amount of financial expenditure is assumed. We offer the method of rational arrangement of solid waste polygons within a certain region. In accordance with our method, some environmentally and economically grounded facility layouts have been developed for operation in all the regions of Belarus.

For the purpose of development two major stages shall be considered:

1) Estimation of the region to be used for projection of a certain number of solid domestic waste polygons.

2) Selection of the area suitable for arrangement of solid domestic waste polygons.

At the first stage, all the operational facilities shall be evaluated and analyzed for their ecological condition and performance potential (residual capacity, useful life). Environmentally hazardous facilities to be out of their performance shall be closed.

In accordance with our estimation, any economically grounded polygon distance to be specified off any waste-generating sources should not exceed 10 km. A number of lands to be used for selection of promising sites are positioned beyond these areas.

The required number of additional polygons shall be specified in terms of ratio of lands being not covered by the operating polygons activity, as well as in accordance with capacities of the community generating wastes within the above lands.

At the second stage to be based on the land multiple classification, the new areas that should meet their standard requirements shall be specified for construction subject to geological-and-hydrogeological, landscape-and-geomorphological, hydrological, economical and social-and-psychological criteria.

With the experience being taken into account, the rate of facility waste load may be determined as the one to be correlated with stability of geological environment, and only if the polygon area is selected in compliance with its correct arrangement, the level of environmental pollution may be considerably decreased (or even prevented), as well as nature-conservative facility costs may be reduced at the expense of application of natural (geological) barriers. Thereby, the geological-and hydrogeological regional conditions were considered with particular attention.

Thus, taking the legal requirement restrictions into account, primarily all the prohibited areas were registered and plotted in the regional administrative maps (scale 1:200 000) including natural complex territories: high-water beds (large and small rivers) and riverside water protection zones, valuable timber lands (first group woods), national parks and wildlife areas, preserves (hydrological, geological and biological) and natural reserves. Besides, resort-and-recreation zones, sweet and mineral water intakes and mineral resource areas were mapped. As a result, all the waste facility-prohibited natural complex areas were mapped.

Then the waste-prohibited area working maps were combined with geological principles within the same scale, as the basic geological-and hydrogeological facilities, to be firstly considered during selection of waste disposal areas, are specified in. Thus, the above maps including waste disposal area geological-and-hydrogeological factors were the ones to be taken as the background for searching of promising territories.