Landfill liner

A landfill liner, or composite liner, is intended to be a low permeable barrier, which is laid down under engineered landfill sites. Until it deteriorates, the liner retards migration of leachate, and its toxic constituents, into underlying aquifers or nearby rivers, causing spoliation of the local water.

Modern landfills generally require a layer of compacted clay with a minimum required thickness and a maximum allowable hydraulic conductivity, overlaid by a high-density polyethylene geomembrane.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has stated that the barriers "will ultimately fail," while the site remains a threat for "thousands of years," suggesting that modern landfill designs delay but do not prevent ground and surface water pollution.

Chipped or waste tires are used to support and insulate the liner.

The primary forms of mechanical degradation associated with geomembranes result from insufficient tensile strength, tear resistance, impact resistance, puncture resistance, and susceptibility to environmental stress cracking (ESC). The ideal method of assessing the amount of liner degradation would be by examining field samples over their service life. Due to the lengths of time required for field sampling tests, various laboratory-accelerated ageing tests have been developed to measure the important mechanical properties.

Tensile strength represents the ability for a geomembrane to resist tensile stress. Geomembranes are most commonly tested for tensile strength using one of three methods; the uniaxial tensile test described in ASTM D639-94, the wide-strip tensile test described in ASTM D4885-88, and the multiaxial tension test described in ASTM D5617-94. The difference in these three methods lies in the boundaries imposed into the test specimens. Uniaxial tests do not provide lateral restraint during testing and thus tests the sample under uniaxial stress conditions. During the wide-strip test the sample is restrained laterally while the middle portion is unrestrained. The multiaxial tensile test provides a plane stress boundary condition at the edges of the sample. A typical range of tensile strengths in the machine direction are from 225 to 245 lb/in for 60-mil HDPE to 280 to 325 lb/in for 80-mil HDPE.

...
Wikipedia