Cluster and correlation analyses of the chemical composition of groundwater nearby MSW landfills

In areas of the European North with a low population density and poorly developed transport infrastructure, it is difficult to organize waste removal and storage at large landfills, therefore many settlements have small landfills of municipal solid waste (MSW), and the practice of placing them in swamps is very common, which leads to the migration of pollutants into adjacent rivers. Environmental monitoring nearby such landfills is hampered by high costs of periodic water sampling and chemical composition analyses. It is possible to decrease the number of substances under analysis and thus reduce costs by determining the marker substances, the concentration of which in groundwater near the landfill has stable correlations with the content of other pollutants. The article provides an analysis of the pollutant concentrations in 45 MSW landfills around the world. The results of cluster and correlation analyses made it possible to identify marker substances and establish the target correlation dependences.