A review of landfill decomposition modelling

Landfill gas is a term used to describe the mixture of gases created by the decomposition of waste within a landfill. Landfill engineering is a developing technology and there is not a good understanding of all the factors affecting gas generation within landfills. One major problem with verifying these models against data from an actual landfill is that the verification process requires an extensive knowledge of the characteristics of the landfill site. The alternative to waiting 20 years for detailed data is to see if existing landfill data can be used to validate these models. It has been found that for a model to reflect accurately the processes within a landfill, a model must take into account the complex nature of the microbiological decomposition of waste within a landfill. The current phase of this work is building a suitable model to take all these processes into account. A discussion of model types and approaches to the process of model building is presented.