Biodegradation of Organic Matter During Mechanical Biological Treatment of MSW

The German Technical Guideline for Municipal Solid Waste (TASI) stipulates criteria for waste to be landfilled in order to minimize environmental hazards and landfill maintenance. One of these requirements is an ignition loss of less than five percent dm (dry matter). Only waste which has been incinerated can comply with this criterion, and subsequently be landfilled. Experts agree that the ignition loss alone is not suitable to predict reactions in a landfill. Therefore, other methods of assessing biological activity of processed MSW in a landfill are presented and discussed. It was found that respiration activity was most appropriate for such an assessment at this stage. From available data, it was concluded that processed MSW is fit for landfilling if the respiration activity is below 5 mg O2/g dm over a period of 96 hours.