Risk assessment for hazardous waste storage site material aging and groundwater contamination

Abstract

Storage sites are the main sites for solid waste storage and also involve environmental pollution risks, but the aging of geomembrane materials and the evolution of defects in hazardous waste storage yards in service environment, which may lead to long-term increase in leakage and sudden increase in pollution risks, have received less attention from scholars. Taking a hazardous waste storage site in northern China (the main solid waste is cadmium-containing slag) as an example, the geomembrane damage characteristics (vulnerability density) and aging characteristics (aging onset time and half-life) were obtained through on-site dipole testing and laboratory geomembrane performance assessment. On the basis of this, we used a hydrological process assessment model (HELP) to simulate the rainfall-evaporation-runoff-infiltration and leachate generation processes under regional scale conditions, and a landfill groundwater contamination risk simulation model (Landsim) to simulate the lateral discharge-leakage processes inside the storage site and the migration-diffusion behavior in the saturated-unsaturated zone after leakage under the aging and defect evolution of geomembrane materials.