Slope failures in municipal solid waste dumps and landfills: a review

Between 1977 and 2005 six large-scale failures of municipal solid waste dumps and landfills have been recorded in the technical literature. The volumes of waste mobilized in the failures varied from 10-12 000 m(3) in a failure that killed nearly 300 people to 1.5 million m(3) in a failure that caused no deaths or injuries. Of the six failures, four occurred in dumps that, as far as is known, had not been subjected to any prior technical investigation of their shear stability. The remaining two failures occurred in engineer-designed landfills, one of which practised leachate recirculation, and the other co-disposed of liquid waste along with solid waste. The paper reviews, describes and analyses the failures and summarizes their causes.