Landfill, You're History

Article from Green Futures Magasine - November / December 2004
www.greenfutures.org.uk

Five thousand years on, the hole in the ground approach to waste management has come full circle, say Dennis Barrie and Francesco Corsi of Entec.

In our first hundred thousand or so years on the planet, waste was essentially organic and easy enough to handle, with an emphasis on re-use and recycling where possible. As time progressed, however, our ancestors started to live in bigger communities, waste management became an issue, and they started putting it in big holes. The earliest evidence of landfill in any kind of organised fashion seems to be from around 3000 BC at Knossos in Crete. Around 500 BC the first recorded municipal landfill opened in Athens – a mile outside the city, to be more precise, as there were Nimbys even then.

Not until the late 13th century were householders in England legally obliged to keep the front of their homes clear from rubbish… and apparently many of them just ignored this law. But now, about 5000 years after the Cretans left us their rubbish to rediscover, it seems we’ve more or less come full circle. Without much fanfare among the general public, though with consequences for everyone, the Landfill Directive took effect this summer, severely restricting the use of landfill across the EU. All wastes must now be pre-treated before landfill.

The directive’s major aims are a reduction of mass and hazards, and greater emphasis on recovery and recycling. Specifically, it ends the UK practice of co-disposal of domestic and hazardous wastes. The number of waste landfills that can accept hazardous waste has been drastically reduced – from 277 to just eight merchant sites as things stand. So landfill gate prices, particularly for hazardous waste such as contaminated soil, are rising – current rates are being reported at 300-400% higher than previous norms. Wastes are also being hauled much longer distances to the remaining landfills, driving up disposal costs and environmental impact still further.

As a case in point, contaminated soil is a common by-product of brownfield developments. Up till now, the practice of ‘dig and dump’ was widespread, but this is no longer the cheap and easy option. In the context of the Landfill Directive, ‘dig and dump’ will need to be dumped. So what are the viable, cost-effective alternatives? It’s an urgent question, with potentially serious impacts on brownfield regeneration, especially bearing in mind that the government plans to increase new housing on brownfield sites to over 60% by 2008. An additional problem is that much of the contaminated soil generated in the UK comes from smaller sites where on-site treatment just isn’t practical.

Entec’s recent CLUSTER report takes a look at the situation with a study of off-site treatment and re-use of contaminated soils as an alternative to ‘dig and dump’. If contaminated soils from numerous sites within a region are fed into a soil treatment centre, the treated material can then be returned to site for reclamation, or even sold as a fill material or aggregate. And with landfill gate prices on the rise, this kind of treatment and recycling becomes an economically viable solution.

Work still needs to be done in the regulatory arena to allow greater opportunities for recycling in this field. But collectively, as we start to realise that landfill won’t sustain us through the next 5000 years of the waste management challenge, it’s encouraging to know that we’re finding viable alternatives to the hole in the ground.

Dennis Barrie is associate director and Francesco Corsi is marketing manager at Entec.
Entec, www.entecuk.com

The CLUSTER report can be downloaded from the Entec website: www.entecuk.com/downloads/cluster.pdf. Sponsored by the Soil and Groundwater Technology Association, it was commissioned and managed by exSite Research Ltd. and funded by Shanks First using the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme.


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