Water and element balances of landfills

Municipal solid waste landfills represent an accumulation of material with less or more pollution potential. A part of this material is transfered to the environment by gas and leachate. To judge the environmental risk of landfills it is necessary to make statements about future emission streams. Today such statements are impossible but some less or more realistic estimations could be made. Results from different investigations are combined to extrapolate measured element transfer from an observed period into the future.Conclusions:-A decrease of leachate quantity could not be estimated. This is only possible with additional top sealing systems.-The most important emission stream over a long time is leachte. For many elements the period until concentrations below todays limiting values is some hundred years and more. The combination of decreasing concentration slopes with time and decreasing pollution limits could multiply the period of environmental risks.-The knowledge of processes in landfills in detail is too small. Therefore the presented results are only hypothesis without possibility of verification in an imaginable time.-A final storage quality defined as near zero pollution potential of solids and pollution stream of liquids cannot reached during the next centuries. The possibility of such defination should be verified under the view of whole mass transport in the environment.