Impact Assessment of Leachate Pollution Potential on Groundwater: An Indexing Method

Abstract

The present study quantifies the pollution potential of the leachate and its effects on surrounding groundwater in the vicinity of four nonengineered dump sites in the study regions of Solan, Mandi, Sundernagar, and Baddi in Himachal Pradesh in India. The analysis primarily focused on the determination of leachate characteristics for determination of the leachate pollution index (LPI), groundwater characterization at different downstream distances using the water quality index (WQI), and heavy metal pollution index (HPI) to study the effects of leachate pollution on groundwater. Characterization of leachate samples revealed that most of the physicochemical parameters and heavy metals were in excess of the permissible limits for the study regions of Himachal Pradesh. The water quality improved with an increase in downstream distance from the dumpsite per the indexing method. Principal component analysis (PCA) was carried out to determine the components arising from natural and anthropogenic components while hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was used to determine and identify the regions of low, moderate, and high pollution zones in the groundwater.