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IV. POLICY OBJECTIVES: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Wisconsin has approximately 850 licensed solid waste landfills of
which 340 have monitoring wells in place. Because the vast
majority of these are at natural attenuation sites, they are
especially vulnerable to groundwater contamination. The expense
involved in monitoring for VOCs at every site on a routine basis
may not be justified if other inexpensive means are available for
groundwater monitoring and protection. This creates the need for
policy which prioritizes the sites and provides for efficient
monitoring schedules. To help formulate policy, we first
conducted a survey of other states' policy requirements. The next
few paragraphs summarize the results of this survey. Following
the survey summary, we present the conclusions from all aspects of
this study and submit preliminary recommendations for VOC
monitoring in Wisconsin.
What are Other States' Requirements for VOC Monitoring?
To provide informational background to state policy wiakers, we
contacted solid waste managers in 48 states and twc Canadian
provinces (referred to as "states" below), and asked them for
details about their regulations concerning VOC monitoring at
solid-waste landfills. Figure 7 depicts how many of the 50 states
have routine, case-by-case, mixed, or no VOC monitoring required
at solid waste landfills. Table 9 lists the states surveyed
individually, and indicates which plan to initiate VOC sampling.
We include the frequency of VOC sampling for those states
requiring, or planning routine VOC sampling.
The survey results show that 19 of the 50 states require sampling
on a case-by-case basis. Many of the respondents from the 19
case-by-case states indicated that they considered elevated
inorganic parameters and a history of hazardous waste dumping to
be the most important factors in deciding when to require VOC
sampling. Thirteen states indicated that they require routine VOC
sampling, however we did not receive enough data to evaluate
specifically how many landfills are sampled routinely in each
state.   Five of the 50 states responded that they monitor under a
mixed strategy of routine sampling at some, and case-by-case
sampling at other landfills. No VOC sampling is required at solid
waste sites in 13 of the 50 states, but two of these plan to
initiate case-by-case VOC sampling soon. Of the states that
require, or plan to require routine sampling, one-third require
sampling annually, approximately one-third quarterly, and the
remaining third require sampling semi-annually, tri-annually,
under a variable time-table, or have not decided on their sampling
frequency yet.
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