UK’s plastic pollution timebomb as coastal landfill sites start eroding into sea

As we countdown to Cop26, the Mirror’s Nada Farhoud looks at the vile waste being spewed up by eroding coastal landfill sites where decades of trash begins to wash into sea as erosion exposes old rubbish

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 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.”

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