The development of sanitary landfills in Taiwan: status and cost structureanalysis

In the last decade, while the increasing trend of solid waste generation an d the public reluctance concerning the construction of more municipal incin erators remained apparent, building more sanitary landfills were required i n many counties to bridge the gap of waste disposal in Taiwan. County plann ers or decision-makers frequently discovered that the lack of comprehensive evaluation of cost structure of waste disposal facilities may result in un expected impediments in decision-making when putting the regional solid was te management program into practice. Therefore, to ease the situation, an u nderstanding of the previous track of design approach with respect to leach ate treatment, presorting and methane gas recovery in sanitary landfills in Taiwan and of the related construction and operating cost structures of th ese facilities becomes useful in creating a valuable solid waste management strategy. It is the aim of this study to investigate the development track of sanitary landfills, to review the technology scenarios and to conduct a multivariate statistical analysis with respect to construction and operati ng costs of sanitary landfills so as to aid in the system reliability in th e way to finance, design, construct and operate solid waste disposal facili ties. Investigation reveals that leachate treatment processes have shown th e growing complexity due to the regulation impacts, and presorting faciliti es and methane gas recovery have received increasing popularity in many reg ions. On the other hand, the seemingly unrelated regression model is eventu ally selected as the most representative cost model. Research finding also indicates that it is always elastic in both construction and operating cost s in terms of design capacity and the features of economies of scale are ap parent to both construction and operating costs no matter when the facility is taken into account as a whole or when only the leachate treatment proce ss is included in the econometric analysis. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.