It is estimated that valuable resources such as raw materials and energy sources lie unused in around 100,000 landfills in northwestern Europe. Many of these landfills are in the immediate vicinity of densely populated areas, which makes the recovery of land and resources interesting in terms of the circular economy. In the future, this will require a comprehensive and cost-effective assessment of the resource potential and the distribution of raw materials in a landfill. Since 2017, as part of the RAWFILL cooperation project funded by Interreg - North West Europe, an innovative approach has been developed in which historical landfill data, geophysical data and reference values from targeted test drillings are combined and used to evaluate the distribution of resources at a landfill site.
In the course of the knowledge transfer, BAV (as project partner) had originally planned the "RAWFILL Training Days" for landfill mining experts and interested students from the environmental sciences on October 21 and 22 at :metabolon with a demonstration of the geophysical investigations used in the RAWFILL project at the Leppe landfill. Due to the COVID-19 measures taken, the project partners decided to offer the workshop in the form of a webinar.
In addition to presentations on the methods and results in the RAWFILL project, the practical field work with the geophysical measuring devices on a landfill was illustrated using small video sequences. In the webinar, the 14 international participants learned how landfill operators can cost-effectively estimate the resource potential of a landfill using a combination of conventional testing (borehole sampling) and minimally invasive geophysical measurements. The workshop further elaborated on how they can select and apply further measures from an economic and ecological point of view using the decision-making aid developed in RAWFILL.
The original article can be found on BAV website.