The problem of storage of solid waste in permafrost

• Published in: Environmental Research Letters
• Main Authors: Valery I Grebenets, Vasily A Tolmanov, Fedor D Iurov, Pavel Y Groisman
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 2021
• Subjects: waste storage; climate change; arctic; permafrost; degradation; deformation of objects; Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering; TD1-1066; Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Science; Q; Physics; QC1-999; Arctic; Climate change
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2375; https://doaj.org/article/c962a922872e4131b9470582dbf9d6a9

The specifics of solid waste storage in permafrost were analyzed. The main types of impact of the waste on the natural environment and frozen soils were determined as mechanical, physicochemical, load, and thermal. The research allowed us to define eight main types of waste storage in the permafrost zone, which were different both in terms of waste accumulation and in terms of their impact on the environment in general and the permafrost in particular. These were: industrial waste storage facilities (slag, sludge and tailing dumps, ash dumps); dumps of rock in sites of mining; household waste accumulators; dumps of wood processing waste in the centers of the timber industry; abandoned territories resulting from a decrease in the population of Northern settlements; storage areas for tanks with residues of fuels and lubricants; tank farms for storing petroleum products in settlements and cities of the North; storage areas for contaminated snow exported from built-up areas. Pollution of waste territories and destruction of many ecosystems as a result of waste storage were caused by use of imperfect technologies for the extraction and processing of raw materials, the ‘legacy’ of past years with disregard to the environmental conditions, the lack of special standards for the storage of garbage and by-product industrial materials, undeveloped methods of waste disposal in harsh climatic conditions.