Coastal Landfill

I think we can all agree that the sea is becoming more and more polluted every day.
So much so that there's now plastic pebbles floating in the sea and the beaches are covered in rubbish like plastic bottles and tin cans.

Some of this is down to the 1200 or so coastal landfills in the UK that are at risk from erosion.
Some are already spilling tonnes of waste into the sea leading to a pollution time bomb around the UK coastline.

Powerful storms and rising sea levels mean once-hidden waste could be exposed to pollute oceans and beaches, according to coastal policy expert Mark Stratton.

"One of the biggest risks of doing nothing at these sites is that the defences will fail and you’ll potentially have former landfill either eroding out onto the foreshore or leaching into the water. Alongside that there’s a potential impact on human health depending on what’s in the sites" he said.


Landfill sites before the 1990s had basically no restrictions about what rubbish could be dumped in them, therefore not a lot is known about what they contain so it can be very dangerous.

Many landfill sites were on the coast and some were used to raise land levels and even as part of flood defences, but as climate change is bringing higher sea levels and stronger storms the flood defences are weakening and in some cases bursting.

There's probably over 77,000 tonnes of waste in all those landfill sites combined. Leaking landfills may also be the source of the bizarre plastic pebbles that are being found on beaches, experts say these lumps of plastic are formed from burnt waste dating back to the 1980s.