Slope Stability Analysis for Waste Landfill in Central District Tegucigalpa Honduras

Abstract

Municipal solid waste (MSW) generation is an exponentially growing problem across the earth with increasing industries, population, and expansion of cities. Societies have created a consumerism culture from which every day waste is deposited in landfills. In the past years all around the world, a big effort and interest has been presented by companies, organizations and governments to reduce the MSW generation by promoting recycling methods and creating awareness of the problem. People may be aware of the increase in waste production but in general, the process behind the disposal of a daily meal residue containing plastic, paper, and organic material until it is buried in a landfill is mostly unknown. The use of open disposal dump areas to engineered landfills represents an important step for controlling the MSW generated by growing urbanizations and in some cases even benefiting from it by the generation of energy sources such as biogas. In every life situation, we are generally looking forward to improvement which is the same scenario for MSW disposal facilities. In this thesis, the sanitary landfill in the city of Tegucigalpa Honduras will be discussed, which in the near future will transition from Section III to a Section IV disposal area in its recently acquired 211,320 m² premises. The objective of this thesis is to generate a supporting tool for the new fourth-stage engineered landfill design utilizing slope stability analyses as a geotechnical reference of both the virgin lands to be used for the new landfill and the finished engineered landfill model. With the use of collected surveying field data, landfill manager guidelines, GeoStudio SLOPE/W, and AutoCAD Civil 3D model assisting software an optimized engineered landfill is presented. Site selection, dimensioning and engineered characteristics of the landfill have been developed in accordance with local landfill management guidelines and regulations promoting health and engineering improvement. Results show that the new projected land area presents suitable topography, ground and slope stability conditions for this project to be executed as presented. It is to be clarified that the analyses and data unveiled in this study bestow a supporting instrument for the design to be accomplished and not an official municipality final design document