The water balances and the long-term performance of different landfill cover systems have been measured in situ in large-scale lysimeters on the landfill Hamburg-Georgswerder, Germany since 1988. The cover systems including different barrier components for water transport were constructed with state-of-the-art technology and have been excavated at several occasions especially to inspect the structure of the barriers. For the first time, the irreversible impact of crack formation in cohesive soil barriers and geosynthetic clay barriers due to desiccation, shrinkage, ion exchange, and plant root penetration has been observed and quantified in this study. After four years of good performance, these covers began to leak between 90 and 200 mm/year (average precipitation of 860 mm/year). The hydraulic conductivity of the cohesive soil barriers increased from 2×10−10 to 9×10−8 m/s, the daily peaks of the leakage through the geosynthetic clay barriers from initial values around 2×10−11 to 2×10−7 m3/(m2 s). The composite barriers with geomembranes above cohesive soil barriers performed very well, showing no leakage and only very little thermally induced water transport. A capillary barrier also performed well (average annual leakage of 18 mm/year). The data of the past 10 years prove that evapotranspiration can be increased significantly by planting bushes, which also limits the potential leakage through barrier layers.
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Melchior et al. (2009) studied this question.