Peat soil for landfill

[ditapark]

Is it suitable if we use peat soil as landfill?
I run a test of the fully saturated and compacted peat soil's permeability and I got 10^-9 m/s which meet the requirement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Is it really safe to use peat instead of clay? If not why? Thank you so much before! I'm really looking forward to this.

 

[BigH]

I've never used peat as a fill for a liner. You might have some hurdles with the EPA. However, I know of a project in Saskatchewan Canada (Cluff Lake) that left a peat layer in place under a tailings impoundment area (uranium) whereby the addition of the tailings would induce consolidation settlement and decrease permeability. lab testing showed that the under the proposed loads the coefficient of permeability would decrease 2 to 3 orders in magnitude. As this would have been approved by the Canadian equivalent of the EPA, you might do a search into this project (the late 1970s era).

 

[oldestguy]

Hey this stuff burns when dry. Get a grass fire going some day and your exposed liner burns up with it. Are you sure some "do gooder" DNR person won't object it ground water is encountered at the borrow area and you maker a non-authorize lake?

 

[ditapark]

However the native soil from the landfill is mostly peat, and I was thinking maybe we could replace the native soil with mixed clay liner, but when I compacted and did a permeability test for the peat itself it shows 10-9 m/s on coefficient permeability, and on EPA it said that "A recompacted clay or modified soil liner at least 90 centimetres thick with an in-situ coefficient of permeability less than 10-9 m/s". Then again the 10-9 m/s coefficient permeability that I got wasn't from clay but from the native soil, so one of the guy at our project insist we just need to use the compacted peat without any modification with mixed clay. And I know peat is a mysterious kind of soil that fluctuate. Can you help why we can't use peat as the landfill liner??