[en] The effectiveness of waste control facilities hinges on careful evaluation of the overall planning, analysis and design of the entire system prior to construction. At present, most work is focused on the waste controlling system itself, with little attention given to the local environmental factors surrounding the facility sites. Containment materials including geomembranes, geotextiles and clay amended soils have received intense scrutiny. This paper, however, focuses on three relatively important issues relating to the characterization of the surrounding geomedia. Leakage through naturally occurring low-permeability soil layers, shrinkages swelling, cracking and effects of dynamic loads on system components are often responsible for a waste containment breach. In this paper, these mechanisms and their synergistic effects are explained in terms of the particle energy field theory. It is hoped that this additional information may assist the designer to be aware or take precaution to design safer future waste control facilities