There’s gold in them thar hills of rubbish, but watch out for bodies
The Secret Life Of Landfill: A Rubbish History Inside The Court Of Appeal
OUT on the Essex marshes, on the great flat mudlands, barges came from London for decades to dump waste. This was the era of the Kray Twins, murderous protection racket gangs and Soho serial killers. Who knows how many corpses went out with the rubbish, to rot in the wasteland?
Dr George McGavin wasn’t interested in playing Unforgotten, the historical TV murder hunt, in his one- off science documentary The Secret Life Of Landfill: A Rubbish History (BBC4). He was much more excited by a different sort of crime — toxic pollution.
Gazing at the mounds of 1960s detritus exposed by floodtides on the Thames estuary, he gasped: ‘It’s bloody horrendous, I’ve never seen such a mess in my whole life.’
Crusty car batteries leaking black fluid lay in the slimy mud beside disposable nappies and shreds of brightly coloured polyester clothing. Tatters of thousands of plastic bags hung like old cobwebs. George picked up a lump of brittle debris that turned out to be asbestos.
The engineer beside him winced. ‘I wouldn’t touch that,’ she said. But that’s the problem with George: he’s that old-fashioned sort of scientist who likes to sniff, poke and dismantle every discovery.
If he found a body in the rubbish heap, he’d want to perform an impromptu autopsy on the spot.
His co-presenter Dr Zoe Laughlin shares his gung-ho spirit. She’s like a chemistry teacher itching to blow up the school science lab. ‘Let’s see if it burns,’ she cried happily, before grabbing a blowtorch and applying it to methane bubbles. The explosion nearly took her eyebrows off.
This was a long programme, but it filled every moment, with facts piled as high as the rubbish mounds.
At a landfill site next to a nuclear power station near his native Edinburgh, George revealed the Scottish capital dumps up to 800 tons of waste a day. That’s just one medium-sized city.
To compact the unrecycled waste, 20 per cent of it plastic, a 55-ton truck with metal teeth for wheels grinds constantly over the landfill, crushing it down.
Tests showed all this garbage could still be there in 1,000 years, much of it undecayed.
‘How did we reach this point,’ George asked in bewilderment, ‘where we throw away so much and value so little?’
There’s enough metal buried in landfill — even gold and rare ores, locked inside discarded mobile phones — that mining companies might one day plunder these sites. Maybe they’ll find missing mobster Jack the Hat, or Lord Lucan.
Whatever ancient evidence is uncovered, don’t expect the Lord and Lady Justices to rethink any convictions. Judges almost never change their minds, as we learned on the pedestrian and depressing Inside The Court Of Appeal (ITV).
This was the first time cameras had been allowed into the stern halls of the London court, with its oaken doors and marble statues in stone niches. As the barristers donned their yellowing horsehair wigs, there was little sense that this was a flexible, open-minded place.
One QC regarded himself with contented admiration in the mirror. ‘I am strangely persuasive,’ he murmured.
None of the appeals examined, for murder, manslaughter and death by dangerous driving, resulted in any change to sentences previously handed down. Judges don’t like to contradict their colleagues.
The cameras peered down from the gallery, or eavesdropped in the waiting rooms and at gravesides. This was an unengaging programme, and one that offered little encouragement.