Technical Notes from the Berlin 2 HDPE Geomembrane Workshop: Assessing Remaining Service Life is a special publication released in 2018 by TRI Minerva and Geosynthetica. It was transferred to the International Geosynthetics Society’s (IGS) open digital library in 2022. On 26 September 2014, the day after the end of 10th International Conference on Geosynthetics (ICG) in Berlin, Germany, a workshop of international experts was held at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) to discuss “development of a protocol to determine the remaining service life of an already exposed HDPE geomembrane liner”. This followed two shorter workshops on the same topic at EuroGeo 5 in Valencia, Spain (2012) and at Geosynthetics 2013 in Long Beach, USA.
From the Introduction:
Nearly all engineered systems have a finite service life. This includes geomembrane (GMB) barriers (liners) as part of the system for the containment of valuable product (potable water, gold solutions, etc.) and contaminated/obnoxious liquids/solids (coal ash, meat processing waste, etc.). All exposed high-density polyethylene (HDPE) GMBs will degrade by oxidation in service and fail by quasi-brittle stress cracking. Clearly, facility owners need to know when a liner will no longer perform its containment function.