Every year in the UK, we dump about 50 million tonnes of waste in the ground. This would be enough to fill a football stadium like Hampden Park to the brim – 50 times over!

A landfill site at Dunbar in East Lothian takes much of Edinburgh’s rubbish and it has won awards for its high standards. Regulations require the use of barrier layers – such as plastic, clay and soil – to ensure safe storage of the waste. The risk of leaks of toxic fluids and gases has to be managed for generations to come.

The manager at Dunbar is a local man. He has a vested interest in maintaining standards for the benefit of his community. The staff maintain clear records of what has been buried and where. It’s information which will be essential for the council planning departments of the future – when, say, they have to decide if a proposed building development should go ahead on the affected land.

The problem is that security of storage and record-keeping was not always this way.

In the past, considerations like the environment – and even public health – were left out of account when deciding whether a big hole in the ground was a suitable place for a landfill site. The modern regulatory system only came into force as recently as the 1990s. [Read more…]