Prof. D. N. Singh

DR. GOLI VENKATA SIVA NAGA SAI

Ph. D.
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, India gvsnsai@gmail.com

Investigations to Establish Landfill Mined Residues as Anthropogenic Resources for Sustainable Development

Valorization of municipal and industrial wastes as anthropogenic resources will reduce the burden on mining natural resources and avoid the geoenvironmental pollution caused by their unscientific disposal. The residues generated from the mining of municipal solid waste landfills and dumpsites, known as Landfill mined residues (LMRs), are such wastes posing a severe threat. Incidentally, LandFill-Mined-Soil-like-Fractions (LFMSF) and Landfill-Mined Plastic Waste (LMPW) amount to 75-90% of LMRs. Hence, their utilization as anthropogenic resources would help in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in the landfill mining sector. With this in view, efforts have been made to determine the physical-chemical-thermalmineralogical and leaching characteristics of LFMSF and their dependency on organic matter. It was realized that the LFMSF consists of organic matter and inorganic carbon, which are prerequisites for a buffer material that would help modify/treat materials exhibiting extreme pH values and enhance the nutrient-holding capacity. In this context, a comprehensive methodology has been developed to establish LFMSF as a buffer material for soil amendment applications. However, as the LFMSF originates from landfills, which are considered sinks for microplastics (MPs), there exists a school of thought that its utilization might accelerate their spread in the geoenvironment in the long run. This apprehension necessitates the determination of MPs concentrations in the LFMSF, for which, unfortunately, no methods prevail. Hence, a novel methodology to extract and characterize the microplastics has been proposed and employed to determine their concentrations in LFMSF. Keeping the higher concentrations of MPs and occasional leaching of heavy metals from LFMSF in view, an attempt has been made to utilize LFMSF as a filler in tandem with the blends prepared from LMPW to create polymer composites.