Forum meeting November 2014

Landfill Aftercare Forum Meeting

Wednesday, November 19th 2014 CIWM, Northampton, NN1 1SX, 09:30 – 16:00

Chair: Keith Knox

Meeting Notes

(downloadable pdfs at bottom of page)

Welcome and Introduction to the meeting

Steve Lee, CIWM; Professor William Powrie, University of Southampton

Presentation:  ‘Introduction to decision support systems, LANDSS and the Forum’

    Keith Knox and Richard Beaven (see attached pdf)

LANDSS is being developed as a knowledge or information-based decision support system (DSS) that will provide information in support of decisions. It is not intended to be a system that will provide a definitive answer to a particular problem and will not replace the user’s decision-making responsibility.

Break out group exercise

In the presentation above, the rationale and proposed design of the landfill aftercare decision support system (LANDSS) was set out.  Delegates were then split into 4 groups to discuss the potential usefulness and usability of LANDSS as proposed. Feedback from this exercise would be used to influence the fundamental direction that LANDSS will take, and delegates were encouraged to be as open and honest with their comments as possible. Delegates were given the following list of topics to assist discussion:

Key messages from break-out groups and plenary discussion (download detailed pdf here)

• There was a clear appetite for participation in a landfill aftercare forum, evidenced by the delegate list from a wide range of organisation, and the contacts made by other interested parties subsequent to the event who would like to be involved in the future.
• There was considerably enthusiasm for LANDSS.  Southampton were encouraged to keep on with its development.
• Main comments about LANDSS are summarised as follows:
  • Site needs to be accessible to all, but restrictions put on the uploading of content to the site
  • Site should concentrate on quality of information rather than quantity
  • Site needs a better front end – perhaps a way to show how all the different topic areas are potentially linked, or a whole site conceptual model/ conceptual site hub. Ideally the site should guide users to start asking the right questions. 
  • Existing content assumes too much technical knowledge of reader.  Needs to be peer reviewed by others
  • Danger that information on site could be misused/ taken out of context, especially condensed information such as rules of thumb.  Therefore include as much contextual information as possible, reference data properly and think about and guard against the ways in which information could be misinterpreted.
  • Be careful about the difference between generic and site specific information.
  • Include as many properly referenced case studies as possible

Presentation: A new approach to funding accelerated Landfill Aftercare

       Jan Gronow, Independent Consultant

Presentation: Beyond the flux box - a simple method for measuring whole site LFG emissions

       Charlotte Scheutz, Technical University of  Denmark

Presentation: Clogging of leachate collection systems

       Richard Beaven, University of Southampton

The meeting closed at ~4pm. It was agreed that the next Forum meeting would be scheduled for early summer 2015.

Delegates