Prof. Kerry Rowe
ABSTRACT: PFAS have emerged as a major challenge for the design of future landfills and their now well-established presence in landfill leachate raises major questions about the containment capacity of existing landfills given the increasingly stringent limits on groundwater impact. This lecture explores research questions that arose from Rowe’s review of the PFAS Clean-up Plan for the former CFA Fiskville. The lecture discusses the subsequent 8 years of advances in research to address these questions related to the interaction of PFAS with barrier system materials, including establishing parameters for modelling potential impact on groundwater quality and the likelihood of meeting criteria as low as 4 ng/L. It presents a simplified but conservative method for assessing the probability of reaching given regulatory criteria for PFAS with single and double compasses liner barrier systems and a discussion of the implications of the selective capacity of a barrier system for controlling PFAS impacts, as well as the implications of the interaction of PFAS with geosynthetics with respect to their service life in the barrier system.