Energy crops cover in landfill

In the last decades the world of the scientific research and of the industrial production, enhanced by national laws, have strongly pushed towards the production and use of photovoltaic and solar panels, of wind turbines and biomass reactors, trying to ensure a sustainable production of energy. All those alternative energy productions need lands and often they are in competion with agriculture. Good practises in waste management, both solid than liquid, and the reuse of surface landfills can be chances to recover land and to enforce alternative energy production avoiding the competition in the use of agricutural land. In this frame, the possibilities to treat the different wastewaters can be related with the quality of land in which the treatment plants are installed. Old landfill leachat was treated in a lab scale plant using three common oleaginous species: Helianthus annus, Glycine max and Brassica napus. Moreover the impact of two different kind of ground, sand and agricultural soil, on plants growing and leachate pollutants removal was investigated. Plants were arranged inside a greenhouse in 20 L pots. Half pots were treated with diluted leachate at increasing nitrogen load in time (200÷2000 mgN/m2·d). The other half, named control pots, were treated with water, adding fertilizer when necessary. Promising results were obtained by the leachate phytotreatment process: high removal efficiencies were obtained for COD (η > 80%), total nitrogen (η > 70%) and total phosphorus (η > 95%). The plants growing was positively affected by leachate irrigation, indeed those plants developed larger biomasses than correspondent controls.