Environmental risk assessment of a young landfill site and its vicinity for possible human exposure

Landfilling is the oldest and cheapest solution for waste management along with the generation of leachate and landfill gas. Present study was conducted on a landfill site to estimate potential human and environmental risks associated with it. Human risk assessment was done by determining the contamination of drinking water by leachate mixing, hazard quotient (HQ) and cancer risk effect (CRE) whereas environmental risk assessment was done by finding out the potential ecological risk index (PERI) and total landfill gas emissions. The results showed that drinking water was contaminated by heavy metals and E. coli within the 2 km radius of the site. Arsenic and Cadmium has the highest HQ of 1.36 and 1.53 respectively whereas their CRE in drinking water was also positive with 6.1 x10(-4) and 4.78 x10(-3) respectively. The overall PERI of the metals was also high (312.49) which was highly degrading for the environment. The total gas emissions were modeled by the software LandGEM (version 3.02), which showed that the total gas emissions from the landfill site in the year 2018 were 1.715E + 04 Mg/yr. Currently, the landfill was graded as moderately risky which could become severely risky with the passage of time.