An investigation by the London-based environmental The ENDS Report magazine has uncovered almost 1,290 sites of toxic landfills with hazardous waste buried under green spaces and housing across England and Wales, the outlet reported on Friday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th January, 2021) An investigation by the London-based environmental The ENDS Report magazine has uncovered almost 1,290 sites of toxic landfills with hazardous waste buried under green spaces and housing across England and Wales, the outlet reported on Friday.
According to the Environment Agency's data obtained by the magazine, there are a total of over 21,000 landfills across the two countries in the United Kingdom, with 1,287 of them toxic.
Many of the 7,265 old landfills, as revealed during the investigation, contain "industrial liquid sludge," while 413 sites have been categorized by the environmental regulator as "unknown."
The ENDS Report has mapped the landfills, 35 percent (449) of which are toxic and buried under green spaces. Additional 21 percent lie beneath farmland, 15 percent are below industrial sites, 10 percent are under parkland, 9 percent under housing and 4 percent under commercial sites with shops and restaurants.
"There's a huge variety of problems out there, ranging from asbestos to PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyl] to radioactive material, to more recent chemicals like PFOA [perfluorooctanoic acid] and pesticide waste that has been dumped in a large number of locations," Paul Johnston, an honorary research fellow at the Greenpeace Research Laboratory at the University of Exeter, was quoted as saying by the outlet.
Johnston added that there was no guarantee that the regulator's dataset was complete and there were no other toxic landfills across the kingdom.
