Development of tool for environmental assessment of municipal solid waste dumps in Brazil

ABSTRACT

The use of landfills as means of disposal of municipal solid waste is a very common reality in developing countries, resulting in consequences such as contamination of natural resources and public health problems. Thus, it is urgent to improve the effectiveness of public policies, in order to promote the proper disposal of municipal solid waste and remediation of landfills. In this sense, this paper aimed to develop a tool for decision support intended to assist municipalities in assessing its landfills in order to establish remediation priorities. The tool was developed in three stages: 1) development of a field survey to diagnose dumps sites; 2) establishment of a scoring system for the field survey, aiming to measure the level of impact of each diagnosed dumpsite; 3) Codification of the tool into a program and validation test. The user input information from the field form, then the program calculate the punctuation, establish the level of impact and generate the dumpsite’s diagnostic. The tool was applied in four open dumps, which served as case studies. The results showed that the tool is able to achieve its goals, contributing to the improvement of waste management in Brazil, even with the limited information available on the diagnosed dump sites.

Keywords:
Illegal dumping sites; remediation of old dump sites; environmental assessment