Addressing the special concerns of landfill closures: VLDPE and textured geomembranes

Landfill closures often require a somewhat different set of properties for synthetic liners than do landfill bottom liner installations. In particular, cap design usually presents the geotechnical engineer with greater concerns regarding long-term slope stability and accommodation of differential settlement. Friction between synthetic liners and materials contacting those liners, multiaxial elongation, and flexibility increase in importance. Since leachate does not contact the liners, chemical resistance becomes less important. Resistance to the components of landfill gas is, in most cases, all that is necessary.

As a result, synthetic liners with a textured surface to improve friction angles, and very low density polyethylene (VLDPE) geomembranes are becoming very attractive to geotechnical engineers. They provide considerable improvement in those areas which are important for cap installation. These materials, however, behave differently in standard index and performance testing of geomembranes, when compared with traditional polyethylene liners. These behaviors and differences are important for geotechnical engineers to understand. They are discussed in this paper.