Landfill horror
MORE than 1,000 coastal landfill sites around Britain are now a plastic pollution timebomb as erosion threatens to expose decades of rubbish to be washed into the sea.
I went to Tilbury in Essex, where two historical landfill sites are now disgorging their contents – five decades of waste – into the Thames estuary.
Layers of rubbish – bin bags, tyres, shoe soles and bits of deadly asbestos – stick out of a muddy bank and are strewn along the foreshore. Broken glass, ceramics and corroded battery parts crunch underneath my feet.
More than 1,000 landfill site were operating around our shores or on estuaries close to cities, such as Liverpool, London and Newcastle, before environmental laws shut them down in the early 1990s.
But, due to coastal erosion, these sites are becoming exposed and the plastic pollution spilling out into the sea is posing a danger to marine wildlife and our bathing waters.
Many of the sites are also vulnerable to flooding from rising seas and stronger storms made worse by climate change. Walking along the Thames Path by the old Goshems Farm landfill site with Professor Kate Spencer, an environmental geochemist from the Queen Mary University of London, she explained how household waste dating back as early as 1930 is buried there.
Until the 1970s there were almost no rules about what could be put into landfill and few records were kept before the 1980s. Things changed in the 1990s, with the EU landfill directive and the introduction in the UK of the landfill tax.
Kate said: “We now have two very significant environmental problems colliding – our past over-consumption and our disposal of waste, coupled with climate change, sea levels rising and coastal erosion.
“When those things collide in the same location there
Decades of trash begins to wash into sea as erosion exposes old rubbish tips
are a lot of potential problems. We have buried waste for decades, thinking we have thrown it away and solved the problem. We haven’t, we have just put the problem on hold.”
Kate is working with a team from her university analysing what impact the plastic, asbestos, and toxic batteries now leaching out of the landfill on to the beach are having on the water.
Work her team has carried out at this and other sites indicates there are contaminant concentrations high enough to cause ecological risk.
There are 1,264 historical landfill sites in the coastal zone where the flooding risk is estimated at 1-in-200 years. Of these, 537 are in or near bathing water catchment areas and 406 in or near sites of special scientific interest.
With the predicted increase in sea
PROF KATE SPENCER level, extreme weather events and coastal erosion due to climate change, experts say a national survey of the old landfill sites is urgently needed.
Emi Murphy, nature campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: “For too long, there has been wilful ignorance regarding historical coastal landfills.
“Plastics are an enormous problem, and leaking landfills also leach toxic chemicals which contaminate our water supply. At best, they should be relocated away from oceans and rivers, but at the very least sealed properly so they do minimal harm to our environment.”
With COP26 about to start in Glasgow, scientists have warned politicians not to forget that the world is also in the midst of a plastic waste crisis. A paper from the Zoological Society of London and Bangor University out this month stressed that plastic pollution and climate change were not separate.
Manufacturing plastic adds to greenhouse gas emissions, while extreme weather disperses plastics in the sea.
Professor Heather Koldewey said climate change and plastic pollution were linked. She said: It’s not a case of debating which issue is most important, it’s recognising the two crises are interconnected and require joint solutions.”
We buried waste and just put the problem on hold