Evaluation of automotive shredder residues (ASR) landfill behavior through lysimetric and traditional leaching tests

With regards to European waste catalog, automotive shredder residues (ASR) can be classified both as a hazardous or non-hazardous waste according to its hazardous properties (H1–H14). It is thus important to carry out an adequate chemical-physical characterization to identify the presence and concentration of those substances able to give, to this extremely heterogeneous material, the hazardousness character of. The issue of waste characterization, to identify the proper site for appropriate waste disposal, is based, according to the relevant laws, to the use of leaching tests. The analysis of the potential effects of landfilled waste in laboratory, however, run into several difficulties in reproducing phenomena depending both on the characteristics of small, heterogeneous quantity of waste and on the local boundary conditions. These difficulties are much more significant as the waste is heterogeneous at the small scale of the laboratory. This is one of the main problems often leading to scattered results even when starting from the same waste parcel. Present research aimed to overcome the above-mentioned difficulties deriving from waste heterogeneity and was based on a lysimetric simulation. Experimentation with lysimeter has shown it effectiveness in the comparison between leachate from the lysimeter and an ASR landfill leachate, from which similar distribution of metal mass ratios, close values for both BOD5 and COD, as well as the absence in both the fluids of organochlorinated compounds, emerge.