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Rapid urbanization coupled with industrial growth has put undue stress on the landfill management system. Landfills are typically planned & designed in view of specific capacities to be handled within a given time frame. However, the landfill space is fully consumed much earlier than planned mainly due to unforeseen growth in public usage especially from civic and industrial bodies. The problem is compounded if the landfill owners have limited space to expand their capacity horizontally. Under such circumstances, the landfill authorities must find another location to build a new landfill or look for options to expand vertically. The former is often not a preferred choice as it needs higher Capex and involves higher operating expenses.

Limitation of space at landfill sites while optimizing the increase in its capacity appear to be paradoxical. Landfill owners prefer to enhance the landfill by rising the dyke vertically. Amongst several options available to increase the height of the bund, reinforced soil slope is the most attractive option due to its technical feasibility, economics and speed of construction.

In one of our projects where the capacity needed to be enhanced for pharma waste, similar challenges of space limitation were present. The project authorities designed the capacity augmentation program by adopting reinforced soil slopes, having a bund height of 9 m with a slope angle of 70° to meet the desirable capacity requirements for landfill waste.

The authorities have chosen TenCate Miragrid® as reinforcing material which exhibit the necessary reinforcement function to take tensile stresses at a very low strain of less than 8% to contain lateral movements and enhance structural integrity of the bund. This effectively safeguards the lifetime performance of the landfill system from leakages or failures.

Miragrid® GX exhibits tensile loads of 55% of the initial tensile strength at only 5% strain which makes the materials very efficient in carrying tensile loads at relatively low strains. The reinforcement bund was designed with tensile strengths varying from 130 kN/m to 60 kN/m spaced at 0.6 m. A gabion facing system was used on the outer side of the reinforcement bund and wrap-around facing with soil bags on the inner side.

The innovative and engineered reinforced bund solved the most typical problem of land scarcity and helped enhance an additional one lakh tons of landfill capacity using TenCate Miragrid® as reinforcement.

Miragrid® GX was used to expand the capacity of the existing landfill by increasing the bund height through the reinforcement of its soil slopes.