Assessment of Impact of Leachate on Groundwater Pollution Due To Municipal Solid Waste Landfill Site

Abstract

In the recent years, due to the rapid increase in industrialization and population, the waste generated due to both industries and household has escalated in an uncontrolled fashion. In developing countries like India, the municipal solid waste management is majorly done using conventional methods like landfills and abandoning the waste at dumpsites. These landfills and dumpsites have become a major threat to groundwater quality. The present study focuses on the landfills of Patiala region of Punjab, India. The main aim of the study is to calculate the amount of harmful components in groundwater and to check the effect of leachate on the quality of groundwater. For this task, samples of groundwater were collected from various locations of the city. The leachate samples were produced in the lab from the garbage collected from different locations and using the artificial rainfall machine. Different physio-chemical parameters are calculated from these samples like pH, temperature, TDS (ppm), total hardness (TH), Magnesium Hardness, Calcium Hardness, turbidity, alkalinity, sulphate, chloride, salinity (%), conductivity (μs/cm), resistivity (Ω.cm), Ca2+ ions and Mg2+ ions. These parameters were compared with the IS 10500:2012 standard. Thereafter, correlation was calculated from these samples. The Pearson correlation coefficients are calculated for this task. Statistical parameters like average, minimum, maximum and standard deviation are also calculated. This provides the variations in different samples from various dump sites. The impact of each variable on groundwater contamination is also studied along with their collective influence. It has been observed from the results that the parameters calculated from the clean water or IS 10500:2012 standard do not match with either the groundwater samples or the leachate data collected in the study. Therefore, groundwater collected from the sites was found not suitable for drinking purpose. The use of proper designing in landfills construction and appropriate leachate collection systems are to be installed in order to solve this problem.