Engineered Contaminated Soils and Interaction of Soil Geomembranes (Geotechnical Special Publication)

Due to liability issues, landfills are no longer considered the best method of waste disposal. Innovative, safe disposal methods for large quantities of contaminated soils and waste are sought by engineers. In urban or industrial areas with most of the contamination, it has become very attractive to engineer contaminated soils and waste by physical or chemical methods and reuse them as construction materials. This proceedings addresses the following: the creation of useful products from contaminated soils and waste; changes in soil or waste properties after processing; logistics of the operations; and the regulatory issues associated with such usage. While alternative methods of disposal are being utilized, civil engineers are still involved in the development of large containment systems and must continue to increase their knowledge of these systems. Solid-waste landfills are made of multi-layered soil and geosynthetic liner systems underlying the fills and providing surface coverage. The slippage/displacement potential for many of these systems is controlled to a large degree by the shear strengths developed at interfaces between the soils and the geosynthetics forming part of either the liner or the cover systems. In this proceedings, recent research efforts to measure the interface strength between geomembranes and soils are presented.