Author(s): Ana Rodriguez; Freddy Soria
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Small municipalities; Water bodies’pollution; Leachates
Abstract: The pollution in lakes can be conceptualized through many approaches. One of them is the contribution of the leachate from a sanitary landfill to the contamination of water bodies. The study case is a region in the Lake Titicaca, located in the Katari basin, and has been identified as one of the most polluted areas in the area. Its main contributors are the Sekériver, Seco river, Hernani river, Katari river, and Pallina river, the later as the main collector of liquid and solid waste from Viacha city, near the capital of Bolivia, La Paz. The objective of this manuscript is to introduce a simple yet important tool for the and we have developed a simple but effective software for the semiautomatic design of small sanitary land fills in small communities, where highly specialized personnel may not be available. We pretend to establish the importance of sanitary landfills in the pollution control. The advantage of landfills are that those facilities minimize the increase of leachates (thereby also preventing the contamination of the flowing rainwater), and are technically and environmentally better and far more economical than designing and installing artificial waterproofing systems, building drainage systems, or carrying out conventional treatment (commonly costly) for these highly contaminated waters, especially in the case of small municipalities. The volume of leachate in the sanitary landfill proposed depends on the following factors: rainfall in the landfill area, surface runoff and/or groundwater filtration, evapotranspiration, natural moisture of the municipal solid wastes, degree of compaction, field capacity. Through a simple application we showed that for an increase in solid waste per year for an initial population of 30000 and twenty years of operation equals to about 6000 ton, the amount of leachate produced is 115.64 mm/year, for which is designed a tank of 9m3. For the scenario of “no-landfill”, the leachate would simply either infiltrate towards Pallina river, a tributary of Lake Titicaca. For 2009 the per capita production of solid waste would be 0.30 ton/year, linearly increasing until reaching 0.33 ton/year under certain considerations. Inexistence of landfills would mean that solid waste are spread around the outskirts of the city, producing about 30 mm/year of nutrient-reach leachate, which after certain assumptions would cause a volumetric load equal to0.0060m 3 /year/km 2. The specific discharge of the basin of Katari, to which Pallina river flows is about 0.4 liter/s/km 2, therefore the contribution from Leachate becomes significant.
Year: 2010