An environmental assessment and a priori implications of field investigations of older MSW at Uyo and Younger MSW at Eket, Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria

Whereas dumpsites are unplanned locations for disposing of waste, sanitary landfills are designed to ensure both environmental preservation and improved quality of life. Over the years, there have been concerns raised about the toxic emissions and leachates that landfills and dumpsites release into air and surface water ecosystems. It is commonly known that leachates from the landfill or dumpsite affect the quality of groundwater in nearby areas through subsurface percolation. This work aims at assessing the environmental impacts and the a priori implications of the released leachates from older and relatively younger municipal solid waste (MSW) sites through resistivity and hydro-physiochemical studies. The VES curves evaluated were primarily K (50.0%), HK, Q (21.4%), and A (7.1%). The visible lithological sequence was characterized by leachate dispersion, controlled by the inverse square law. The electro-lithofacies in Uyo MSW site has extremely lower resistivity due to older age than Eket MSW, which comparatively displayed marginally low resistivity values due to its seemingly younger age. The hydro-physiochemical parameters indicate that the dumpsites and their contiguous milieus are highly polluted by leachates. The results of this work indicate that groundwater is highly depleted by leachate contaminations and so residential quarters and buildings requiring groundwater resources should not be encouraged within the enclave of the dumpsites. The study reveals that the use of surface and groundwater resources for irrigation in MSW sites depends on salt adsorption ratio and hardness, which necessitates an annual evaluation for environmental mitigation.