Feasibility study of the bio-barrier with biologically-active tire rubbers for treating chlorinated hydrocarbons

The leachate from landfill released into the subsurface environment can result in serious environmental problems such as soil and groundwater contaminations because there is no landfill liner system in the unsanitary landfill. The authors developed the multi-permeable reactive barriers (M-PRBs) to treat mixed contaminants in leachate and to get over the limitation of a single reactive barrier. The M-PRBs consist of two reactive barriers using the abandoned materials such as waste steel scrap mixed with converter slag acting as an iron-based barrier and biologically active tire acting as a bio-barrier. In this study, the efficiency of tire rubbers as a sorption media and a biologically active media were evaluated. Tire rubbers extensively adsorbed. amounts of chlorinated compounds and the biologically active tire media removed chlorinated organic compounds (93% of TCE and 77% of PCE) as well as organic matters (80%) for 10 days. Overall, this work suggests that biologically active tire media followed by an iron-based barrier in the M-PRBs can effectively treat mixed contaminants in landfill leachates through bioaugmentation.