| Abstract
| - Emissions of organic compounds from landfills depend onthe fate of the compounds inside the landfills. This fieldstudy was used to investigate the fate in landfills of organiccompounds having different physical, chemical, andbiological characteristics. For this purpose, a pilot-scalelandfill was constructed containing 540 m 3 of ordinaryhousehold waste, 12 organic compounds were added atthe top of the landfill, and leachate and landfill gas sampleswere continually collected and analyzed. The fate ofeach compound was theoretically estimated from literaturedata on the processes which significantly affect thecompounds: sorption, dissociation, evaporation, andtransformation. These processes could be described bythe octanol/water coefficients, Kow, the acid dissociationconstants, pKa, the Henry's law constants, H, and the potentialof the compounds to be biologically transformed. Theuse of a ranking score system was suggested as a toolfor interpreting the predicted fate of specific compoundscaused by several simultaneous processes. A good correlationcould be found between the measured emissions andthe theoretically evaluated fate. It was concluded that theconstruction of a pilot-scale landfill is a useful methodfor studying simultaneous processes in landfills and thatthe emissions of organic compounds from landfills can bequalitatively predicted from literature data.
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