Toxic waste and hospital blood baggage may leak into our water provides
Experts say it’s the ‘worst possible scenario’ as floods caused by climate change now threaten to wash the hazardous junk into our food chain
Toxic waste, ‘forever’ chemicals and even yucky hospital blood bags are at risk of leaking into our water supplies from thousands of dodgy old UK landfill sites, experts have warned.
Surging numbers of floods caused by climate change now threaten to wash the hazardous junk into our food chain. Europe may have up to 500,000 landfills and most were built before strict modern pollution controls existed.
More than 22,000 of the danger dumps are in the UK. But experts have no idea which ones pose a threat because of “inadequate records”.
Prof Kate Spencer, of Queen Mary University, said: “It’s the worst possible scenario. Most landfills will be fine, but you only need a small number of sites which contain very toxic chemicals to be a problem. We just don’t know which ones.”
The new data comes from the first Europe-wide mapping of the ticking time-bombs.
New landfills built since 1999 must be lined to stop hazardous liquids seeping into the nearby ground.
But Prof Spencer added: “We’ve identified wide-ranging wastes at an eroding coastal landfill in Tilbury including what looked like hospital blood bags.
“We are talking about tens of thousands of sites that if they aren’t lined and are at flood risk, then there’s multiple ways for it to get into groundwater, surface water and the food chain.”
Landfills built before 1999 had almost no rules for containing dangerous leaks.
Patrick Byrne, of Liverpool John Moores University, said: “With increasing frequency and magnitudes of floods and erosion from climate change, there’s a greater risk of these wastes washing into our environment.”
It includes plastics, building materials, toxic metals and chemicals such as Pfas which are dubbed ‘forever chemicals’. They contain a super strong carbon-fluorine bond, which makes them extremely difficult to break down.
