A NEW SOFTWARE TOOL FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL DATA FOR MSW LANDFILLS ACCORDING TO THE EU "LANDFILL DIRECTIVE"

The Landfill Directive (Council Directive 1999/31 EC) requests all landfill operators to implement "control and monitoring procedures" in order to measure landfill emissions and to assess the state of the environment at the landfill site. Landfill operators will have to manage large amounts of data, necessary to evaluate the compliance to the "trigger levels" approved by the permitting authority. At the same time, such amounts of data can be used as a useful management tool, with the aim of monitoring the environmental performance of landfills. This fact can be understood if we consider that one of the aims of the directive is to request landfill operators to implement a monitoring system whose requirements go in the same direction of EMAS requirements. This article describes a new software tool that can be used as part of this management system. Flexibility is the fundamental feature of this tool: it is able to accept data from different sources, gathering data in a unique and homogeneous archive, and it enables to compute and display many different derived data using formulas defined by the users.