Portuguese multimunicipal lanfills design and construction

Abstract

In the last few years, an important effort has been made in Portugal in order to change the waste management policy. The open dumps are being closed and several sanitary landfills are being constructed. In this process, geosynthetics are playing an important role. However, the application of geosynthetics requires new earthworks concepts and new geotechnical approaches to design, which were almost absent until recently in Portugal. This paper focuses its attention on the preliminary data collected from the Multimunicipal Solid Waste landfilis already constructed. The main design requirements adopted, for which some international specifications were followed, the Construction Quality Assurance prepared by National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (LNEC), and, finally, the main construction problems detected are reported in the paper.