Australian scientists are suggesting erection of underground barriers to prevent contamination of aquifers by poisonous fluids leaching out of rubbish dumps.

Researchers in the Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE), based in South Australia, are developing a solution to one of the most urgent problems faced by modern society worldwide.

Leaky tips are a worldwide problem as human populations swell, especially in newly industrialising countries where there are few controls over tip design or contents. For the sake of society’s health, practical low cost solutions are urgently needed.

“The contamination depends on what was in the garbage placed in the tip.  It usually contains old industrial and household chemicals, solvents and oils, antibiotics and endocrine disruptors, medical drugs, personal care products, biological pollutants and heavy metals,” explains CRC CARE project leader Professor ‘Vigi’ Vigneswaran of the University of Technology Sydney.

The solution to this little-noticed assault on society’s good health is the ‘permeable reactive barrier,’ an underground wall that filters and cleanses the toxic flow before it can enter the aquifers which are used by communities for drinking, domestic, stock or industrial water.

While modern tips are designed to prevent the flow of toxic leachate from reaching groundwater, older tips were not, and many are still quietly and insidiously feeding the pollution from decades ago back into the community of today.
 
According to Professor Ravi Naidu, Managing Director of CRC CARE, Vigi’s barrier can be buried twenty metres or more into the ground and be up to two metres thick.