November 2015, Volume 2, Issue 11 JETIR (ISSN-2349-5162) JETIR1511022 Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org 124 GEOTECHNICAL PROPERTIES OF AN OLD WASTE DUMPSITE: A CASE STUDY OF SURAT 1 Haresh D. Golakiya, 2 Chandresh H. Solanki 1 Assistant Professor, 2 Associate Professor 1 Civil Engineering Department, 1 Government Engineering College, Dahod, Dahod, India Abstract— Land cost in urban area is increasing day by day as a result of urbanisation, industrialisation and population explosion in developing countries like India so it became a challenging effort to put out a strong engineering solution for the sustainable structural stability at the costly places in the urban areas of covered land filling. Considering the vision of a sustainable development, the challenge of the geotechnical community is to supply more environmental friendly construction techniques, reduce the use of natural resources and promote the use of less harmful products. Solid waste disposal in landfills is the most economical form of disposal of waste particularly in the developing country as compared to incineration. Landfill Engineering Design Problems involve various aspects like determination of geotechnical properties of waste, land fill settlement, slope stability, field performance of landfill cover and liner systems, seismic behavior of the disposal site during earth quake etc. As the land cost is increasing tremendously and decreasing availability of good construction site is building up pressure on the engineers to utilize even old landfill sites which covers a large area. If it is to planned to develop such landfill site for the purpose of infrastructure it is necessary to determine geotechnical properties of such landfill site. In this study, geotechnical properties of an open waste dump site at Surat city is evaluated to check the feasibility of development of housing for economically weaker section, which otherwise constructed on very costly urban area. Index Terms—Landfill, Geotechnical Properties, Urabanisation ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I. INTRODUCTION As a result of urbanisation more and more people choose to live at urban area and more and more people continuously migrating from rural area to urban area. Urbanization rate is continuously increasing due to industrialisation. Another major problem for developing countries is population explosion. As a result of this in urban area more and more land is being used for infrastructure development and good construction site utilized rapidly. It became a challenging effort to put out an effective engineering solution for the sustainable structural stability at the costly places in the urban areas like landfill site. Solid waste disposal in landfills is the most preferred solution for the safe disposal of solid waste than any other disposal method. Landfill Engineering Design Problems involve various aspects like determination of geotechnical properties of waste, land fill settlement, slope stability, field performance of landfill cover and liner systems, seismic behavior of the disposal site during earth quake etc. A landfill is a system that is designed and constructed to dispose of discarded waste by burial in land to minimize the release of contaminants to the environment. Till very recent times, landfill technique has been used simply to dump the municipal solid waste, so not ample care was taken in their construction and maintenance. With rapid industrialization the concept has changed its shape. As uncontrolled landfills have caused pollution in environment, regulations have been imposed on landfill location, site preparation and maintenance. Some level of engineering has been made mandatory for landfills. The major disadvantage of landfill is it required large area. If the landfill area can be improved and can be used for dwelling purpose, plenty of area can be available, but it will become a challenge for the environmental geotechnical engineers to put out strong engineering solution and develop new technology so such dump site or landfill site can be utilised. In this direction the first and foremost step is to determine geotechnical properties of landfill site. Landfills may include internal waste disposal sites (where a producer of waste carries out their own waste disposal at the place of production) as well as sites used by many producers. Many landfills are also used for other waste management purposes, such as the temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or processing of waste material (sorting, treatment, or recycling). The term „landfill‟ can be treated as synonymous to „sanitary landfill‟ of Municipal Solid Waste, only if the latter is designed on the principle of waste containment and is characterized by the presence of a liner and leachate collection system to prevent ground water contamination. The term „sanitary‟ landfill has been extensively used in the past to describe MSW disposal units constructed on the basis of „dump and cover‟ but with no protection against ground water pollution. Landfill is the ultimate disposal process for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management. The quantity of MSW for land disposal can be substantially reduced by setting up of waste processing facilities and recycling the waste materials as much as possible. It is estimated that the inert wastes for landfill occupies 40-55% of the total wastes depending upon type of city. Waste is an unavoidable by-product of human activities. It may be generated in form of solids, sludges, liquids, gases and any combination thereof. With increasing industrialisation the quantity of waste has increased immensely. Depending upon the sources of generation, some of these wastes may degrade into harmless products whereas others may be non –degradable and hazardous. Municipal solid waste (MSW), also called urban solid waste, is a waste type that includes predominantly household waste (domestic waste) with sometimes the addition of commercial wastes collected by a municipality within a given area. They are in either solid or semisolid form and generally exclude industrial hazardous wastes. Municipal solid waste comprises of wastes from households including garbage and rubbish, sanitation waste and street sweepings. MSW also includes wastes and